The first European settlers in this area were members of the Society of Friends, or Quakers, who came from the regions around Edinburgh and Aberdeen in Scotland and, encouraged by the East Jersey Board of Proprietors, made their homes along Cedar Brook in the early 1680s. In 1736, a meeting house was built and a cemetery was established here on land donated to the Society of Friends by John Laing, a local Quaker landowner. American soldiers were said to have been quartered in the meeting house in the winter of 1777 during the Revolutionary War. The property remained in use until 1788, when the Quakers, needing a larger meeting house, moved to a site on what is now Watchung Avenue in the City of Plainfield, where it remains to this day.