The Cornwall Friends Meeting House is a historic meeting house located on a 5.4-acre (2.2 ha) parcel of land at the junction of Quaker Avenue (Orange County 107) and US 9W in Cornwall, New York, United States, near Cornwall-St. Luke's Hospital. It is both the oldest religious building in the town, and the first one built. In 1988 it was added to the National Register of Historic Places as a well-preserved, minimally-altered example of a late 18th-century Quaker meeting house.
Built in 1790, it emulates the doubled style of meeting house pioneered by Buckingham Friends Meeting House in Pennsylvania two decades earlier. David Sands-Ring, a local convert to the Religious Society of Friends and the son of a wealthy landowner, sponsored the construction of the meeting house. At first a branch of the Nine Partners meeting near present-day Millbrook in Dutchess County, it later became an independent congregation within the Society. Members also maintain the Smith Clove Meetinghouse in Highland Mills to the south of Cornwall.
Read more about Cornwall Friends Meeting House: Property, History
Famous quotes containing the words friends, meeting and/or house:
“The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatched, unfledged comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel; but being in,
Bear’t that the opposed may beware of thee.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“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)
“A pilgrim I on earth perplext,
with sinns, with cares and sorrows vext,
By age and paines brought to decay,
and my Clay house mouldring away,
Oh how I long to be at rest
and soare on high among the blest!”
—Anne Bradstreet (c. 1612–1672)