A Brief History of the
Meetinghouse of Buckingham Monthly Meeting
According to the National Park Service,
National Historic Landmarks guide us in comprehending important trends
and patterns in American history. They form the common bonds that tie together
the many groups that settled the country and provide anchors of stability in a
fast-changing world, ensuring that the nation's heritage will be accessible to
generations yet unborn.
This statement could not be truer of the house of worship in which
you now sit. The members of what
would become the Buckingham Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends
had for years traveled many miles to attend Falls Meeting in lower
Bucks
County
. These Friends, some of whom still
have descendants in our Meeting today, had begun meeting for worship under the
care of Falls in each others’ homes by 1702.
In 1705 James Streator donated to Falls Meeting ten acres of land in
Buckingham, and “in a clear grassy spot, on the west side of a path that went
winding up the hill,” member Stephen Wilson built their first meetinghouse—a
log cabin. By 1720 their membership
had grown to the point that, in the minutes of Bucks Quarterly Meeting of Ninth
Month, 1720, it was recorded:
Whereas Friends of Buckingham who have hitherto belonged to Falls Meeting,
being now pretty much increased in numbers, and having for a long time with
some hardships traveled a great way, moved to have a Monthly Meeting of their
own, not withstanding the Falls Friends are loath to be deprived of their good
company and assistance, yet this meeting, having taken their requests and
reasons into consideration, consents to their proposal and allows them to have
a Monthly Meeting of their own.
It is possible that a second meetinghouse of frame construction was
erected around 1710; minutes of 1720 record the enlargement of the meetinghouse
with a stone addition, but it is not clear whether this was the original
structure or not. The addition was
probably used as the Women’s Monthly Meeting.
Between 1729 and 1731, the
membership having outgrown its quarters again, a third (or second) meetinghouse
was built, this time entirely of stone. By
1750 there was talk of relocating to larger quarters yet again,
but the project was delayed as Friends could not agree on where to put the new
building.
With
the help of a large committee formed by Bucks Quarterly Meeting, they finally
concluded to place the building “on the hill.”
Construction of the third (or fourth) meetinghouse, the building in which
you now sit, was commenced in Eleventh Month, 1767 under the direction of Thomas
Smith and later Joseph Ellicott. Mathias
Hutchinson was the master builder and most likely the architect. He completed
the masonry work and plastering, using stone easily found “in the
neighborhood,” and built the current
Buckingham
Friends
School
as well in 1794. The carpentry
work, mostly of white cedar, was the work of Edward Good.
All of these men were members of the meeting.
The project had apparently
commenced none too soon, as it was recorded that the business meeting of Fifth
Month, 1767 took place in the stable—the old meetinghouse had burned down!
Worship continued in the house of Benjamin Williams until the new
meetinghouse was ready in First Month, 1768.
The masterwork of
Hutchinson
and Good has obviously served the meeting community exceedingly well ever
since.
While it is certainly beloved by
its members, what makes Buckingham Meeting worthy of being named a National
Historic Landmark? For one thing, it
has changed remarkably little since 1768. While
its Georgian architecture may appear plain to us today, for its time the
structure was a bold statement of the growing numbers, wealth, and importance of
the Buckingham Quakers. The (later
modernized) privies, the porch, plumbing, heating and electricity were all later
additions, but the remainder of the structure appears almost exactly as it did
then. The
Old York Road
also originally ran between the meetinghouse and the graveyard, but was
thankfully shifted to the south in later years.
More importantly, Buckingham’s
1768 building was one of the first examples of a new design of “doubled”
meeting, and it became the model after which numerous other meetings throughout
the (future)
United States
were patterned. Some historical
background to this innovation is necessary.
From its early beginnings under the leadership of George Fox and his wife
Margaret Fell, the Society of Friends was far ahead of its time in promoting and
affirming the equality of the sexes. In
England, men and women met together for meeting for worship each First Day, but
once a month sat in separate rooms to conduct the business of the meeting (hence
the term “monthly meeting”). At
the time, this separation was considered respectful of the important position
that women held in the meeting community, including the vitally important
planning of marriages and other social events.
However,
the men’s and women’s “apartments” in the meetinghouse were not
equal—the women’s side, as in our 1720 addition, was almost always smaller
and less well appointed, as it needed to hold only half the membership—the
women during their meeting for business. In
America
, Buckingham’s 1768 meetinghouse changed all of that.
The mid-eighteenth century was a time of great soul searching and
spiritual reform among American Quakers. The
French and Indian (Seven Years’) War was a violation of Friends’ peace
testimony, and Friends withdrew from participation in
Pennsylvania
’s colonial government to avoid supporting armed conflict.
Quakers turned away from the outside world toward what Howard Brinton
calls “deep spiritual inwardness” and isolation.
During this Quietist movement, marrying “outside the meeting,” for example,
became grounds for “disownment”—expulsion from the Society of Friends.
As enforcement of rules relating to moral behavior and marriage within
the Society became more important, so to did the role of the women’s meeting
for business, which had care of these matters.
Buckingham Meeting was therefore a statement, in stone and mortar, of the
equality of men and women under God, and of the different but equally important
roles that men and women played within the Society of Friends.
To the casual observer, our
meetinghouse appears symmetrical
although in reality the women’s side—the one we now use for worship—is
actually slightly narrower. (Ironically,
the men’s side is now the social side.) In
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in
America
, men and women sat on their respective sides for both worship and
business, although the vertically sliding partitions were kept open for meeting
for worship. Both of these practices
were dispensed of in Buckingham by 1896.
National Historic Landmark status will place our
house of worship in Buckingham on the same footing as the
Brooklyn
Bridge
, the
United States
Capitol
Building
,
Pearl Harbor
,
New York
’s Grand Central Station, and just 2,500 other such sites in the country.
Members are most appreciative of the work Historical American Buildings
Survey of the National Park Service to bring such prominence to our meeting.
On the occasion of the 201st anniversary of the founding
of Buckingham Meeting in 1923, Sarah H. Gilbert wrote:
We are hoping, too, that this action may
contribute toward an end we earnestly desire—that our fine
old meeting house may be not merely a notable historical
monument…but that the meeting be more of a present-day
influence, whose power may be felt throughout the community,
helping disseminate the Quaker message that was never more
needed than in the troublous times of today.
With God’s providence, may Buckingham Meeting stand for another 235
years as a spiritual—and architectural—example to our nation and all the
world.
