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:
“Prayer is the fair and radiant daughter of all the human virtues, the arch connecting heaven and earth, the sweet companion that is alike the lion and the dove; and prayer will give you the key of heaven. As pure and as bold as innocence, as strong as all things are that are entire and single, this fair and invincible queen rests on the material world; she has taken possession of it; for, like the sun, she casts about it a sphere of light.”
—Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)
“The skyscraper establishes the block, the block creates the street, the street offers itself to man.”
—Roland Barthes (1915–1980)
“The lack of closeness among friends is a fault that cannot be reprimanded without becoming incurable.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Alone, even doing nothing, you do not waste your time. You do, almost always, in company. No encounter with yourself can be altogether sterile: Something necessarily emerges, even if only the hope of some day meeting yourself again.”
—E.M. Cioran (b. 1911)
“I am cold in this cold house this house
Whose washed echoes are tremulous down lost halls.
I am a woman, and dusty, standing among new affairs.
I am a woman who hurries through her prayers.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)