The Records of the First "American" Denomination: The Keithians of Pennsylvania, 1694-1700
For the ten years between 1691 and 1701 George Keith and his schismatic Quaker followers upset the precarious religious order of infant Pennsylvania. Although the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting disowned Keith in 1692 and the London Yearly Meeting did likewise in 1694, after Keith returned to England, religious tensions scarcely eased in Pennsylvania. Friends continued to fret about his followers, who literally stormed the doors of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in 1696, and the wony continued after Keith's followers divided among themselves. The documents printed below constitute the principal surviving "denominational" records—if they can be called that—of the Pennsylvania Keithians, the Quaker schismatics who were essentially expelled from the Religious Society of Friends in Pennsylvania in 1693, then began splitting among themselves, some becoming "Keithian Baptists," others gravitating