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On 26 June 1658, thirty people gathered at the house of Nicholas and Hannah Phelps in the less densely populated region of western Salem called the “woods”… Recognizing the gathering as a radical departure from established practice, the alarmed authorities forcibly brought the meeting to a close. The magistrated, “informed of a disorderly meeting of certaine suspected person att the house of one Nicholas Phelps of Salem,” dispatched the constable, Nathaniel Felton, accompanied by maltster Edmund Batter and tailor John Smith, to the woods… The mistress of the house, Hannah Phelps, contributed to the uproar by verbally abusing Smith, whose young wife – Margaret Thompson Smith – was in attendance. Although Goodman Smith would have the satisfaction of seeing Phelps admonished in court for her carriage toward him on that Sabbath day, his efforts failed to alter his own wife’s sympathies… Nicholas Phelps was fined for having the meeting in his home as well as for absenting himself from mandatory public worship services and for attending a meeting of Quakers…
Nicholas Phelps was “fined for defending a Quaker’s writing and sent to the house of correction at Ipswich for an indefinite time for confessing himself a Quaker.”…