Plymouth Community and Meetinghouse 

The area that is now Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania was originally settled by members of the Religious Society of Friends, or Quakers, who built the Plymouth Friends Meetinghouse in 1708. They had sailed from Devonshire, England, on the ship Desire, arriving in Philadelphia on June 23, 1686. The settlement takes its name from the founders' hometown of Plymouth in Devonshire.

The Welsh settlers of Plymouth were members of Radnor, Marion and Haverford Meetings before they built a meetinghouse of their own. When their new Plymouth Meetinghouse was ready, Radnor Friends wrote a letter asking members of Plymouth "please do not forget us."

Historic images of the Meeting House Click here
 

A Timeline of Plymouth Meeting Community and Meetinghouse

 Historic Quaker Meeting Houses

Given that meeting houses were not an original feature of the Friends, there was no standard form for the building except simplicity.  Differing from many religions, the Friends have no central hierarchy, Quaker Meetings govern from the small to the large.  In other words, a Monthly Meeting has more influence over its Meeting than the Quarterly and the Quarterly more than the Yearly. 

Therefore, traditionally individual Monthly Meetings chose the form of building.  This created a great deal of variation.  In England, this has remained the case.  Although, American Quaker’s experimented with different forms for the “Meeting House", by the middle 18th century a preferred form had developed. 

Initially, the Meeting Houses tended to be one room to hold both Meeting for Worship and Meeting for Business.  Since the men’s and women’s Meeting for Business oversaw different subjects for the Meeting, having only one room was difficult two separate Meeting for Business.  Eventually many meeting houses constructed an addition of a separate room for the Women’s Meeting for Business.  However, this was felt to be unequal; after Meeting for Worship the women had to leave the room to go to their space. 

Equality between the Meeting for Business began to be reflected in the Meeting House form and was truly achieved in 1768 with the design of the Buckingham Meeting House. Although the size of Meeting Houses would vary depending on the population of the Meeting, this Buckingham form was repeated almost exclusively through 1830 and remained the prominent form through the late nineteenth century.

This form, referred to as the Double Meeting House or the Buckingham Model, created two chambers identical on both the interior and the exterior.  Although the Meeting House was divided, the division wasn’t intended as an element of exclusion but two separate but equal chambers. 

The room was united during Meeting for Worship. But, by closing a wooden screen in the center of the room, the Men’s Meeting for Business and Women’s Meeting for Business could be held separately and simultaneously. The Double Meeting House is quintessentially American and is a representation of the Americanism of the Quaker religion in which women are complete equals to men.

The Plymouth Monthly Meeting house was known in the Delaware valley as a two-stone Meeting. The right side was lower than the left. After the fire in 1867, the ridge line of the roof was evened up and both sides were reconstructed in the Buckingham double-Meeting style to be mirror images of each other.

The original building became the left side of the Meeting house, built from limestone in about 1708. The right side, built in 1780, was built out of ironstone and other rubble and became the women’s side for Meeting for Business as well as the school. There was no door between these two sides.

Minor changes to the Women’s side (loss of window and the door on the back) were made in 1945 to make way for the bathroom and kitchen.