No. 7 October 2001
The authoritative source
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Feature
of the month
Wooden
Friends: the remaining frame meeting houses
The
oldest Quaker meeting house in the state lies at Seaville, in Cape May
county. It is a modest structure, erected in 1716 or 1727, and might be
mistaken for a small Pinelands or shore cottage built 200 years later.
Many of the earliest Quaker meeting houses may have looked like this,
but today, it is unusual in one respect: it was built of wood. Of the
33 early Friends meeting houses I have photographed, 23 were built of
brick and only six were braced-frame wooden buildings; four were built
of stone: Stony Brook (outside Princeton),
Arneys Mount (Burlington
county), Evesham, in Mt. Laurel and
Quakertown (Hunterdon county). With
the exception of the Newton Friends meeting house in Camden and the meeting
house in Seaville, none of the wooden meeting houses are found in the
southern part of the state, and with the exception of Trenton's two meeting
houses, none of the Quaker buildings in the northern half of the state
were built of brick. Many of the meeting houses in Pennsylvania were built
of stone, but none that I know of (more than 100 remain) are wooden. So
we are presented with the question of why these regional differences?
Plainfield [right]
(b. 1788) and Shrewsbury
[below, left]
(b.1816) are clearly recognizable as Friends meeting houses, but the others
might easily be mistaken for modest dwellings. Measured drawings of Shrewsbury
and Plainfield done by HABS (Historic American Buildings Survey) show
that those two look little different from the meeting houses in, for example,
Salem (b. 1772) and Crosswicks
(b. 1773), or from many of the meeting houses in Pennsylvania. The Quakers
who settled in 
Shrewsbury
in 1672 predated the great Quaker migration that came up the Delaware
River between 1677 and 1682 and settled Burlington and Salem counties;
they may have come from a different part of England and brought with them
a different building tradition—but these buildings were erected a
century later and the Quaker idiom from the English midlands is likely
to have been diluted by then. Most of the 18th and early 19th century
meeting houses in England look more like small manor houses than the dominant
style that emerged in south Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania, but there
are clear antecedents in several of the English buildings; so, it is not
difficult to trace influences back to the English midlands where many
of the Quaker immigrants originated.
Those who settled in Dover
[below, right] (b. 1758) had arrived in Burlington in the great
migration, pushed north into Trenton, then into Hunterdon county by 1727,
and, by 1740, into Morris county. They
met in private homes until 1758 when the Woodbridge meeting (congregation)
granted permission to build a 25 x 26 foot meeting house in Mendham, at
a cost of £78. It was repaired in 1792 and again in 1828. In the
20th century, a detached wing was added and horse stalls were built to
the rear.
In 1758, The Plainfield meeting was formed
by Friends who moved east from Monmouth county, and the group that settled
in Seaville probably came from Nantucket and the Massachusetts Bay colony.
The Newton Friends
[below] (Camden) came directly from Ireland in 1681 or thereabouts,
but that building was erected in 1828 and rebuilt in 1888, by which time
the Quakers (in Pennsylvania) had moved in the direction of more mainstream
church architecture, and 
the
Newton addition reflects a subdued Queen Anne Revival style in many of
its details. If you block out the additions to the right and the left
in the photograph, the building looks similar to Seaville, and particularly
to another early brick meeting house in Upper
Springfield Township, Burlington county, built in 1727.
The meeting house in Manasquan
[below] (Monmouth county) can trace its origins to Friends in Wall
Township, who organized a meeting in 1693. The building was 
damaged
in 1808 and, more severely, in 1888, after which it was rebuilt. So the
small shingled building we see today may bear little resemblance to the
1808 meeting house. The supports for the pent roof have been transformed,
the principal entrance is on the gable end, and the round top to the window
high in the gable end is unusual, but there are precedents for all elsewhere
in the state. By the time of the Civil War, the evangelical zeal and expansionism
of the Friends had waned and attendance had fallen off seriously, and
this building may reflect, like the one in Camden, a movement towards
mainstream religious architecture.
All six buildings are pegged frame structures, built without nails except
to attach the clapboards or shingles. The smaller ones are squarish or
nearly so, with the principal door(s) normally on the long side (usually
the south) and a side door on the east. Plainfield used heavy plastering
to fit the building for winter worship, but some early frame meeting houses
in south Jersey were replaced with brick because of the difficulty of
heating a frame building in winter. All appear to have galleries, which
was traditional.
Shrewsbury
is much the largest wooden meeting house, equaling in scale many of the
brick buildings found in Crosswicks [left]
and Salem. Why are these built of different materials? We know it was
not the period in which they were erected; all but Seaville were built
after the Friends had turned inward and had developed an organizational
hierarchy, but that was true for more than half the brick buildings in
South Jersey as well. It is likely that regional building traditions were
influential—there are few 18th century brick churches Cape May, Morris,
Union, and Monmouth counties, and most of the early churches of modest
scale in the northern part of the state (Bergen excepted) were wood frame.
Alternatively, it may simply reflect that it was cheaper to build of wood
than brick; early records granting permission to build a meetinghouse
often specify that the size and/or the cost was not to exceed a limited
figure. Whatever the reason, the wooden Friends offer a valuable look
at variations on the subtle traditions of Quaker architecture.
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© 2001 Frank L. Greenagel