The town of Mountmellick in County Laois is historically a very important town because it was the main settling place of The Quakers in the 1600s. The Quakers were a group of people that came from England who were well-known for their honesty and their hard work. It was this work ethic that helped to make Mountmellick one of the busiest and most wealthy towns in Ireland at that time.
The Quaker movement was founded by George Fox in 1647 and by 1660, it had roughly 35,000 converts. Most of these were either craftsmen or farmers. One of these men was William Edmundson and he settled in Mountmellick along with 5 other Quakers in 1659. At this time, the population of Mountmellick was 175, of which 95 were English and 80 were Irish.
Although many of these English Quakers looked down on the Irish, much of their work had a positive effect on the Irish people. For example, their schools were rated very highly for their standard of education and in a government report in 1858, the first Quaker school in Mountmellick "deserved the utmost praise and was the most credible managed school of its kind in Ireland". The boys would learn writing, maths and farm skills, while the girls were taught knitting, sewing and other household duties.
They also gave great help and support to Irish families during the hardship and destruction that the Great Famine caused in the 1840s.