•c. 1665 First Friends arrive in eastern North Carolina.
•1672 William Edmundson, a Friends minister from Ireland, holds first documented religious service in North Carolina. Quakerism’s founder, George Fox, visits later that same year.
•1680 First written record of Friends in North Carolina.
•1695 -1696 Quaker John Archdale serves as governor of the Carolina colony.
•1698 North Carolina Yearly Meeting is established.
•1746 John Woolman visits North Carolina
•1750-1775 Friends from eastern North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Nantucket Island migrate to piedmont region of North Carolina
•1770 North Carolina Yearly Meeting adopts a statement condemning the importation of slaves, restricting purchase, and encouraging Friends to watch over the morals of any slaves already owned but still stops short of outright condemnation.
•1776 NCYM makes slaveholding a disownable offense.
•1777 Eastern North Carolina Friend Thomas Newby and ten other Friends free approximately 40 slaves, drawing the attention of the courts and the North Carolina General Assembly
•1777 Law tightens manumission procedures, including prohibition except for meritorius services as established by courts and mandating seizure of any “illegally” freed slaves.
•1779 Committee on the North Carolina legislature reports “the conduct of the said Quakers in setting their slaves free when our open and declared enemies were endeavoring to bring about an Insurrection and the Slaves, was highly criminal and reprehensible.”
•c. 1800 Westward migration to Ohio and Indiana begins as growing numbers of Friends leave the South.
•1808 North Carolina Yearly Meeting begins owning slaves as a measure to allow individuals to cease being slave owners within the restrictions of laws against manumission.
•1813 Ohio Yearly Meeting founded (settled in part by North Carolina Friends migrating to the Midwest).
•1816 First meeting of North Carolina Manumission Society held at Centre Meeting in Guilford County.
•1821 Indiana Yearly Meeting founded (largely settled by North Carolina Friends migrating to the Midwest).
•1822 North Carolina Yearly Meeting stops accepting slaves from non-Friends seeking to manumit through the processes established in 1808.
•1830 North Carolina emancipation law requires posting of $1,000 bond for each slave to be freed to require good behavior and insurance that the freed slave would leave the state within ninety days.
•1831 Nat Turner Slave Insurrection in Southampton County, Virginia.
•1831 North Carolina law prohibits teaching slaves to read or write.
•1834 Last meeting of North Carolina Manumission Society held at Marlborough Friends Meeting in Randolph County.
•1835 Revision of the North Carolina State Constitution disenfranchises free blacks.
•1837 New Garden Boarding School, later rechartered to become Guilford College, opens as a Quaker boarding school with fifty students (all European American as the school would not integrate to enroll African American students until 1962).
•1837 English Quaker and abolitionist Joseph John Gurney visits North Carolina and the new school at New Garden.
•1844 Virginia Yearly Meeting laid down, leaving North Carolina Yearly Meeting as the only yearly meeting located in what would become the Confederacy. The few Friends remaining in Virginia are attached to Baltimore Yearly Meeting.
•1861-1865 During the Civil War Friends suffer hardships, deprivation and persecution due to their stance on slavery. The North Carolina Yearly Meeting suffers through the lowest membership in its history.
