The meetings became a sort of Chautauqua for visiting Friends having a ‘concern’ and many came to hear these people from far off. John Woolman visited Fairfax in the early 1740’s. The famous Elias Hicks visited in 1798, and several times later; Stephen Grollet in 1801 and Richard Mott in 1801; John Kersey (the book has it Jersey Kersey), a famous Quaker preacher and author of the driest book I have ever read; Elizabeth Robson, Bartholomew Wister and Ruth Ely, 1826. Elizabeth Robson was an English Friend with very Orthodox views as was Thomas Shillitoe, another English Friend who came to Loudoun on a preaching mission in 11th month 1827. Also gracing the fronting benches of the Loudoun Meetings were Elisha Bates, John Comly, Edward Hicks, whose primitive paintings are so much in demand, and the famous Benjaman Hallowell who started Robert E. Lee in mathematics.
Stephen Grellet, Elizabeth Robson, and Thomas Shillitoe were the so-called Orthodox Friends whose ministry throughout the country helped to cause such sad havoc in Friends meetings and brought about the separation of 1827-28. Loudoun Friends at this time were little affected by the ideas advanced by these people, based mostly on theology and evangelism which at the time was traveling thru many of the churches of the land. Some eight families took off from Goose Creek Meeting only, Fairfax being affected not at all. These Orthodox Friends, as they came to be called as opposed to the so-called Hicksite Friends, built a meeting house south of the graveyard in Lincoln on the next hill, a corner now of J. C. Chappell’s heirs. Here they had a meeting until the Civil War, when it was laid down.
Along about the early 1880 this sad chapter in Friends history had to be reopened when Richard and Mary Snowden Thomas, brother and sister from Baltimore, raised the clarion call of evangelism. At first, in 1885, the Orthodox meetings were held in the Lincoln Lyceum Hall until a house could be built. In all about eight families withdrew from Goose Creek to form this new Lincoln Monthly Meeting of Friends which occurred in April of 1887 in their new meeting house. Daniel J. Hoge, Clark and Rebecca I. Brown were appointed overseers with Joseph Pancoast as treasurer. A subordinate meeting was organized at Silcott Springs in 1894 but its life was short, being closed in the winter of 1904-5 and the building sold in 1933.