The Litchfield Society was the first organized auxiliary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, one of the first American Christian missionary organizations. It was created in 1810 by recent graduates of Williams College. In the 19th century it was the largest and most important of American missionary organizations. The founding of the ABCFM was inspired by the Second Great Awakening. In 1806, five students from Williams College in western Massachusetts took shelter from a thunderstorm in a haystack. At the Haystack Prayer Meeting, they came to the common conviction that "the field is the world" and inspired the creation of the ABCFM four years later. The objective of the ABCFM was to spread Christianity worldwide.Congregationalist in origin, the ABCFM also accepted missionaries from Presbyterian (1812–70), Dutch-Reformed (1819–57) and other denominations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Board_of_Commissioners_for_Foreign_Missions
See also The Haystack Prayer Meeting, held in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in August 1806, is viewed by many scholars as the seminal event for the development of Protestant missions in the subsequent decades and century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haystack_Prayer_Meeting
