Arch Street Meeting House

The Arch Street Meeting House is the home of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, which is as old as Penn’s colony. The largest Quaker meeting house in the city, the simple, almost unornamented building was erected in 1803-11 to the design of Quaker master builder Owen Biddle (1774-1806), one of the most important figures in early American architecture. 

As a builder, Biddle oversaw the construction of the first building of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1805-1806) and the Permanent Bridge over the Schuylkill (1798-1805), but those works were designed by others. The Arch Street Meeting House is the only extant structure that he designed himself. 

Biddle championed architectural education. He offered private lessons and unsuccessfully lobbied the Carpenters’ Company (of which he was a member) to establish a training program. But he is best known for writing the Young Carpenter's Assistant, or a System of Architecture Adapted to the Style of Building in the United States, published in 1805. This was only the third architecture handbook to appear in this country, and among its plates is an illustration of the innovative wooden truss that supports the roof in the Arch Street Meeting House.

The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting had moved several times as Penn’s city began to take shape, but it put down roots in 1696, when it built its “Great Meeting House” at Second and Market Streets. This was replaced by the “Greater Meeting House” in 1751, but still larger accommodation was eventually required, and it was decided to build here on Arch Street, on a Quaker burial ground that had been established in 1683. 

The new building had separate rooms of equal size for the men’s and women’s Yearly Meetings--business meetings at which, unlike worship meetings, men and women met separately. The East Room (for men) was completed in 1803-05, and the West Room (for women) in 1810-11. The latter preserves its original layout, with an upper gallery for children. All of the simple woodwork was originally left bare in the “plain” manner of the Quakers. 

At the time of the great doctrinal schism among Quakers in 1827, the “Hicksite” faction left the Arch Street Meeting and erected their own building. The “orthodox” faction remained here, and when the two sects came back together in 1955, this became again the home of a united community.

Throughout its history, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting has campaigned for social justice. While some early Quakers owned slaves, in 1774, the Meeting ejected slaveholders, and its members were also leaders in the prison reform movement, founding the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating Miseries of Public Prisons in 1787. In the nineteenth century, the Meeting supported the Underground Railroad, and, after Emancipation, it provided services for the newly freed. It was here, too, that one of the foundation blocks of the modern peace movement, the American Frends Service Committee, was established in 1917.