Note: Historical sources place this group in New London, Connecticut, not New York.

The Rogerenes, sometimes called the Rogerene Quakers or Rogerines, were a religious sect founded in 1674 by John Rogers in New London, Connecticut. Rogers came from a prosperous local family and broke away from the Seventh Day Baptists of Rhode Island to start his own congregation. Although the group was frequently nicknamed “Quakers,” it had no formal ties to the Religious Society of Friends; Quaker-like elements of its worship, such as silent prayer and plain living, were borrowed rather than inherited.

Early Rogerene theology drew from several dissenting traditions. Like the Seventh Day Baptists, members initially observed a Saturday Sabbath, though over time they came to see every day as equally holy, and they eventually took to working openly on Sundays as an act of protest. Like the Baptists, they practiced adult baptism by immersion. Like later Christian Scientists, they believed illness could be treated through prayer rather than medicine. This mix of practices set them apart from both the established Congregational church and the region’s other dissenting groups.

The Rogerenes were known less for quiet nonconformity than for open confrontation. Members would march through New London on the Sabbath, loudly announcing that they were performing ordinary labor, and would interrupt Congregational services to argue theology with the minister, most famously Gurdon Saltonstall, who later became governor of Connecticut. These provocations led to repeated arrests, fines, floggings, and jail terms; John Rogers himself was at one point declared insane by Saltonstall and imprisoned in a windowless cell. The sect also rejected the authority of civil and church officials over marriage, conducting weddings under its own rites, which were not legally recognized and caused further friction with neighbors.

Persecution eased over the eighteenth century, and by the 1800s many members had drifted toward other denominations. Communities remained concentrated in what are still known today as Quaker Hill in Waterford and Quakertown in Ledyard, Connecticut, and a smaller offshoot settled in parts of New Jersey, near what became Lake Rogerine in present-day Roxbury Township. As direct conflict with the Congregational establishment faded, the Connecticut Rogerenes redirected their energy into reform movements. They became active in the abolitionist cause, and Quakertown served as a station on the Underground Railroad in the mid-1800s. By the second half of the century the group was firmly pacifist, sponsoring large open-air peace meetings near Mystic starting in 1868 that drew thousands of attendees by the 1880s. That gathering site is preserved today as the Peace Sanctuary, cared for by the Denison Pequotsepos Nature Center.

By the twentieth century the Rogerenes had largely dissolved as a distinct religious community, their once-radical positions on religious liberty, pacifism, and social equality having become far less unusual in mainstream American life. Little remains of the sect beyond place names, archival collections (including materials held at the Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College), and a handful of local histories documenting a group whose defiance shaped two centuries of religious life in southeastern New England.