Zephaniah Buffington (born 1771) was a farmer and merchant active in Dartmouth, Massachusetts. His business connections appear to have been principally within the Society of Friends communities of Bristol County, Massachusetts and Washington County, New York, the latter being a community started by emigrants from the Dartmouth area. As a merchant within this Quaker network, Buffington had dealings with other prominent Bristol County Quakers, including Joel Packard, Stephen Gifford, Peleg Slocum, and Joseph Howland and Company. Furthermore, his one marriage in the Dartmouth vital statistics was to Lydia Tucker, the daughter of another Dartmouth Quaker family; she died within two years of the wedding.

The account book contains miscellaneous notations principally for the year 1803. Included are two major ventures: one, a cheese voyage, in which Zephaniah Buffington purchased cheese from many of the Quaker farms in Dartmouth for sale in New York. He split the profits with his brother Stephen. The second concerned the sale of hoes, again principally, it seems, in Washington County. There are also, in the 50 pages of the volume, inventories of goods on hand, suggesting he ran some sort of store; notations for notes payable and notes receivable, with amounts running into hundreds and even thousands of dollars; and accounts concerning his "up country" farm, including the keeping of cows and sheep, the amount of cheese made, accounts of his farm tools, and an accounting of his "cheese things" - vats, tubs, groundstones, baskets, etc.