The Religious Society of Friends, formally known as the Quakers, was founded in seventeenth-century England during a time of religious and political turmoil. As devoted pacifists, Quakers followed a Peace Testimony that committed them to seek peace, reject warfare, and relieve suffering, a principle tested repeatedly during the Revolution. The Stony Brook Meeting House, dating to 1726 and among the oldest surviving Quaker meeting houses in the United States, stood at the center of a community established in the 1690s by Quaker farmers who built a thriving agricultural settlement on land purchased from fellow Quakers William Penn, Thomas Warne, and other East Jersey Proprietors seeking a place of refuge. When British forces occupied Princeton in December 1776, the Stony Brook Quakers endured many hardships, including British troops quartered in their private homes and Meeting House. During the battle in the winter of 1777, local Quakers refused to take up arms and instead sheltered and cared for wounded soldiers regardless of allegiance, then helped rebuild damaged structures, restore the landscape, and bury the dead. A colonnade across Mercer Street marks one approximate burial place for soldiers from both sides of the conflict, and about a mile south George Washington divided the nearly 6,000-man Continental Army into three columns in an attempt to surround the British garrison at Princeton. As the Revolution began, Quakers in the colonies faced difficult choices between neutrality, independence, and loyalty to the Crown; most remained neutral according to their Peace Testimony and were distrusted and harassed by both Loyalists and Patriots, though many younger Quakers concluded that the war’s moral cause outweighed their religious commitment.