Located in Adams Township, Dallas County, 3 miles north or Earlham, the Bear Creek Friends Meeting played a key role in the evolution of the Iowa Society of Friends and in the beginnings of the Friends settlement in northern Madison County.

In the beginning, a substantial number of Friends, mostly from Indiana, emigrated to the area surrounding what would eventually become the town of Earlham. This began in the early 1850s and the migration grew to support three Friends Meetings, Union, North Branch and Bear Creek. The details of this growth can be found in the History of Earlham Friends Meeting.

Over time, as with many religions, disagreements over procedures either changing, or not changing resulted in factions of religious conservatives seeking to keep the old ways and progressives wanting to adopt new ideas from within or from external sources. Such was the fate of the three Meetings in the Earlham area. The breaking point came in February, 1877 when a Bear Creek Quarterly Meeting was followed by the opening of a four day revival meeting by Benjamin B. Hiatt and Isom P. Wooten. On the fourth day they called “for all those who wished to forsake sin and lead a different life to come to the front seats”. Immediately about 20 people came forward and several others were then convinced to join them. The conservatives, shaken to their core arose as a group and left the meeting.

It took three more months before a conservative response was forthcoming and that response, issued on May 29th, laid out all the unacceptable practices that had crept into the Meetings over the past 25 years. And, it was concluded by the following declaration of independence: "We believe that the time is now fully come when it is incumbent upon us to disclaim the appointment of all the offices imposed upon us by the nondescript body now in the seat of church government and replace them by those in unity with the doctrine and in favor of supporting the ancient principles and testimonies of our society".

At Bear Creek on June 30, 1877, the conservatives met at the schoolhouse and organized a separate Meeting. At the September Yearly Meeting in Oskaloosa, they submitted a report separate from their progressive brethren which was rejected by the Yearly Meeting. The Bear Creek Conservatives then issued a call for all like minded Iowa Friends to meet in a separate building and they there organized the Iowa Yearly Meeting of (Conservative) Friends on September 7, 1877.

As it turned out, the Bear Creek Meeting held mostly conservative members so those not wanting to be a part of the conservative movement left to join the Earlham (formerly Union) Meeting as did most of the North Branch members and North Branch was closed. Surviving to modern times are the Earlham Meeting and the (Conservative) Bear Creek Meeting.

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