Arch Street Friends Meeting House

Arch Street Friends Meeting House, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is a Friends Meeting House of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). It is the oldest meetinghouse of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) still in use in the United States.

Pennsylvania founder and Quaker William Penn donated the land to the Society in 1693 as a burial ground for members. The meetinghouse was built between 1803 and 1805 atop the graveyard and then enlarged in 1811, when the west wing was added to accommodate the Women's Monthly Meeting. The original east wing now houses exhibits on the life of Penn, and the west wing is used for meetings for worship.

Notable members have included abolitionist Lucretia Mott. Edward Hicks, the noted painter and cousin of Elias Hicks, attended the yearly meeting.

The meeting house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971 and declared a National Historic Landmark in 2011.

Read more about Arch Street Friends Meeting House:  Notable Interments

Famous quotes containing the words arch, street, friends, meeting and/or house:

    Thir dread commander: he above the rest
    In shape and gesture proudly eminent
    Stood like a Towr; his form had yet not lost
    All her Original brightness, nor appear’d
    Less than Arch Angel ruind, and th’ excess
    Of Glory obscur’d: As when the Sun new ris’n
    Looks through the Horizontal misty Air
    Shorn of his Beams, or from behind the Moon
    In dim Eclips disastrous twilight sheds
    On half the Nations, and with fear of change
    Perplexes Monarchs.
    John Milton (1608–1674)

    If you would learn to write, ‘t is in the street you must learn it. Both for the vehicle and for the aims of fine arts you must frequent the public square. The people, and not the college, is the writer’s home.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    If there could be such a thing as the Mammon of Righteousness Christina would have assuredly made friends with it.
    Samuel Butler (1835–1902)

    An association of men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which has never yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town meeting or a vestry.
    Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)

    When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.
    William James (1842–1910)