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:

    Men themselves have wondered
    What they see in me.
    They try so much
    But they can’t touch
    My inner mystery.
    When I try to show them,
    They say they still can’t see.
    I say,
    It’s in the arch of my back,
    The sun of my smile,
    The ride of my breasts,
    The grace of my style.
    I’m a woman
    Phenomenally.
    Phenomenal woman,
    That’s me.
    Maya Angelou (b. 1928)

    I mount the steps and ring the bell, turning
    Wearily, as one would turn to nod good-bye to Rochefoucauld,
    If the street were time and he at the end of the street,
    And I say, “Cousin Harriet, here is the Boston Evening Transcript.”
    —T.S. (Thomas Stearns)

    Your friends praise your abilities to the skies, submit to you in argument, and seem to have the greatest deference for you; but, though they may ask it, you never find them following your advice upon their own affairs; nor allowing you to manage your own, without thinking that you should follow theirs. Thus, in fact, they all think themselves wiser than you, whatever they may say.
    William Lamb Melbourne, 2nd Viscount (1779–1848)

    They had met, and included in their meeting the thrust of the manifold grass stems, the cry of the peewit, the wheel of the stars.
    —D.H. (David Herbert)

    A nation grown free in a single day is a child born with the limbs and the vigour of a man, who would take a drawn sword for his rattle, and set the house in a blaze that he might chuckle over the splendour.
    Sydney Smith (1771–1845)