The building at 6924 East Quaker Street has been in use since September 1821, when the congregation moved in before it was finished. It is the oldest house of worship in Erie County. According to the Western New York Southtowns Scenic Byway marker out front, it was the first of any denomination in the county.
People still worship in it at eleven o'clock on Sunday mornings. That is the part worth leading with.
Danby, Vermont to the Southtowns
Quaker David Eddy came from Danby, Vermont in 1804, and his extended family followed. Word of the place traveled back east (the marker quotes the description that circulated, an "uncultivated part of nature's garden, luxuriantly timbered, rich soil, with never failing springs and streams"), and over the next dozen years Friends arrived from Vermont, eastern New York and Pennsylvania.
They met for worship first in the cabin of early settler Obadiah Baker, on East Quaker Road. When they outgrew it, in 1811 they bought a half-acre on the northeast corner of Orchard Park's Four Corners (with a log house already standing on it) for $20, and used that. They bought two more acres on the northwest corner for the sole purpose of burying their dead. The congregation's own history dates a log meeting house to 1812.
Then the War of 1812 interrupted communication with the Pelham Meeting near Welland, Ontario, which they answered to under Quaker structure. They grew anyway. In 1817 they bought three acres on the present site from Aldrich Arnold for $115, and started building in 1820.
What is inside
The frame is hand-hewn beams held together with wooden pegs. Nearly everything else in the room is shaped by how Friends actually meet.
- A moveable partition down the middle, so that men and women could hold their meetings for business separately.
- Facing benches at the front, raised, for the elders.
- The original L-shaped balcony, which allowed 300 people to worship in the building at once.
Three hundred. In Orchard Park, in the 1820s, in a farming settlement barely fifteen years old. That number tells you how many Friends were out here better than any paragraph could.
A library, a school, and two movements
In February 1823 the Quakers established the first local lending library in this building. The charge to its curators, as the marker records it, was to "lend them to such families as they shall find to be most in need, having particular regard to women Friends." That is 1823, on a dirt road, with the written instruction to prioritize women.
In 1826 they built a school on the property, facing North Freeman Road near the corner of East Quaker Street. Horse sheds went up as well: first along the western lot line, later immediately behind the meetinghouse, where they appear in a photograph from around 1895.
The marker credits the meetinghouse with "unparalleled activity" during the eras of the Underground Railroad and the women's suffrage movement. That is the marker's characterization and the congregation's inherited memory, and Quaker involvement in both causes is well documented as a general matter. What specifically happened inside these walls is a story the Meeting and the county historians own. It is worth knowing and worth not embellishing.
Still an active congregation
This is not a museum, and it does not present itself as one. The Orchard Park Friends Meeting gathers for worship every Sunday at 11:00, in person and over Zoom, in the silent waiting form: no sermon, no program, anyone free to speak if moved to. The high ceiling, the windows onto the trees and the balcony benches are the same ones the 1821 congregation sat under.
Ten generations, the marker says. Two centuries of the same room, the same practice, the same building. If you go, go on a Sunday and go quietly.
Wear it
The Friends Meeting House tee puts an 1821 timber-frame meetinghouse on a shirt, which is not the obvious choice and is exactly why we made it. It joins our Chestnut Ridge Park and Eternal Flame Falls designs from the same town in the ALL America City collection, one real Western New York landmark per shirt. Every town we have covered is in the full town-by-town guide.