File:Downingtown Friends Meeting House, 800 East Lancaster Avenue, Downingtown, Chester County, PA HABS PA-6653-2.tif

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Summary

- Downingtown Friends Meeting House, 800 East Lancaster Avenue, Downingtown, Chester County, PA
Title
- Downingtown Friends Meeting House, 800 East Lancaster Avenue, Downingtown, Chester County, PA
Description
Price, Virginia Barrett, transmitter; Boucher, Jack E, photographer; Price, Virginia B, historian; McGrath, James, delineator; White, John P, delineator; Schweitzer, Elaine, delineator; Ienulesca, Irina Madalina, delineator; Larkin, Cleary, delineator; Willard, Kelly, delineator; Arzola, Robert R, project manager
Depicted place Pennsylvania; Chester County; Downingtown
Date Documentation compiled after 1933
Dimensions 5 x 7 in.
Current location
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print
Accession number
HABS PA-6653-2
Credit line
This file comes from the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS), Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) or Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS). These are programs of the National Park Service established for the purpose of documenting historic places. Records consist of measured drawings, archival photographs, and written reports.

This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing.

Notes
  • Significance: Downington Friends Meeting House is representative of the single-cell building type, a form developed by the Friends during the early settlement period. Initially conceived when they followed the English format for worship and business, the single-cell type was prevalent up until the era when the American Friends created their own religious program. Different from the English program, the American Friends needed for their meeting houses to accommodate separate, defined spaces for men and women. These spaces were generally equivalent in size. For Downingtown, however, there are two caveats. It is a nineteenth-century structure and it is larger than the one-room meeting houses erected during the settlement period. This meeting house, then, signals the re-emergence of that early building form in meeting house design. It also is likely that Downingtown was the first example of this revived, but revised, building type. Although seen much earlier at Downingtown, the retrospective single-cell type characterized many of the meeting houses erected after the schism between Orthodox and Hicksite Friends in 1828. The single-cell or one-room plan was a viable solution because it readily accommodated the relatively small number of members in the new meetings created as a result of the separation, just as it had the small groups of immigrants a hundred years or so before. The interior plan of Downingtown Friends Meeting House also is reflective of earlier habits. A partition divided the space into two apartments, but it extends from side to side-running the length of the building. By the time of Downingtown's construction, common practice among the Friends favored partitions that were oriented parallel to the gable ends, running the width rather than the length of the building. This made Downingtown's internal organization unusual in its day. Significantly for the American Friends' programmatic needs, the placement of the partition produced two almost equal sized rooms, one each for the men's and women's meetings at Downingtown. At the same time as it fulfilled the American Friends' spatial requirements for two equally-sized rooms, the partition's orientation produced an interior arrangement reminiscent of that developed for the English program wherein men and women Friends met for worship together and then separated into gender-specific groups for business meetings. In the English format, generally a larger room was required for the inclusive meetings for worship and only a smaller room needed for the women to withdraw into for business; moreover, once split into business meetings, the women Friends did not have to see the facing benches and so were not hampered by the side to side placement of the partition. Early meeting houses in southeastern Pennsylvania, such as Merion Friends Meeting House and Sadsbury Friends Meeting House, were constructed in this manner. Similarities in membership size and in the rural location of these meetings to Downingtown likely contributed to the revival of the single-cell building form, as well as the orientation of the partition, in the nineteenth-century.
  • Unprocessed Field note material exists for this structure: N825
  • Survey number: HABS PA-6653
  • Building/structure dates: 1806 Initial Construction
Source https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/pa3801.photos.213142p
Permission
(Reusing this file)
Public domain This image or media file contains material based on a work of a National Park Service employee, created as part of that person's official duties. As a work of the U.S. federal government, such work is in the public domain in the United States. See the NPS website and NPS copyright policy for more information.
Object location40° 00′ 23″ N, 75° 42′ 13″ W Kartographer map based on OpenStreetMap.View this and other nearby images on: OpenStreetMapinfo

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coordinates of the point of view

40°0'23.00"N, 75°42'13.00"W

coordinates of depicted place

40°0'23.00"N, 75°42'13.00"W

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Date/TimeThumbnailDimensionsUserComment
current07:44, 1 August 2014Thumbnail for version as of 07:44, 1 August 20145,268 × 3,832 (19.25 MB)FæGWToolset: Creating mediafile for Fæ. HABS 31 July 2014 (3000:3200)
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