Friends Meeting House Fund

Historic American Buildings

Building Anew

Meetinghouses and Quaker Youth

Rochester Friends' New Meeting House

A True Haven

Traveling Meeting Houses

Amesbury Meeting

Book Review: The Quaker Meeting Houses of Britain

Diagram of Celtic pattern floor grille from Little Egg Harbor Meetinghouse, Little Egg Harbor, New Jersey (Historic American Building Survey) Much of the HABS database is online and they have over sixty Meetinghouses listed. Click the search button to see it's records of Friends Meetings!

From the late seventeenth century until the present, the Delaware Valley has been a cultural stronghold of the Society of Friends. Over 150 Quaker meeting houses still stand in the area. The centers of Quaker religious and social life, they are often well preserved and present the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) with an unparalleled opportunity to document the evolution of an important building type. The recording of Quaker meeting houses historically associated with Philadelphia Yearly Meeting has been undertaken as part of the congressionally funded documentation of historic sites within Southeastern Pennsylvania and Southern New Jersey.

Unencumbered by the religious persecution experienced by English Quakers, the Friends of the Pennsylvania Colony were free to experiment with various forms, developing a building that best facilitated both meetings for worship and separate men's and women's business. . . . By the 20th century, many meetings had given up separate meetings for business, eliminating the need for the partition. The emphasis on the facing bench diminished, along with the role of elders and overseers, often replaced by a fireplace hearth or other focus. The general benches are situated in the round, disregarding a hierarchy. Other functions of the society originally undertaken in separate buildings- such as social rooms, school, restrooms, kitchen-were now often combined within a single structure. Despite larger trends, the relative autonomy given to the individual meetings to adopt changes in practice, and to create buildings incorporating local building traditions and indigenous materials, has resulted in a wide ranging variety of building forms. The guiding force behind meeting house design has always been the ability to facilitate meeting for worship (and business), further influenced by Quaker tenets such as simplicity.

For more information about this survey contact: Historic American Buildings Survey, National Park Service, P.O. Box 37127, Washington, DC 20012-7127, tel. 202-343-HABS.

Editor's note: the above information was taken directly from HABS "Work Plan Phase II: 1998- 99." HABS also supplied the architectural drawings used throughout this issue.