Appoquinimink Friends Meetinghouse: Smallest Sanctuary on the Underground Railroad

On Main Street in Odessa, Delaware, stands a brick building so small that most people walk past it without a second glance. Twenty feet wide and twenty-two feet deep, the Appoquinimink Friends Meetinghouse is claimed to be the smallest brick house of worship in the United States. Built in seventeen eighty-five, it is also one of the most consequential small buildings in Delaware history.

The Quakers who gathered here held convictions that put them at direct odds with Delaware law. Members of the meeting, including John Hunn and his cousin John Alston, ran active networks assisting freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad. Local tradition, reinforced by historical research, identifies this meetinghouse as a stop on that network, with enslaved people hiding in the loft of the tiny building as they moved northward. When Hunn was caught and prosecuted for helping fugitives, he paid the fine rather than abandon the work. His case became famous in abolitionist circles.

The Quakers of this meeting also pushed boundaries in education. A school affiliated with the meetinghouse became the first in Odessa to admit African American students, years before the Civil War made such integration a matter of national debate. In a state that balanced on the legal and cultural border between North and South, these gestures carried genuine risk.

Odessa itself had once been a thriving commercial port called Cantwell's Bridge, shipping wheat and flour down the Appoquinimink Creek to the Delaware River. By the eighteen seventies the railroads had bypassed the town and commerce shifted north, leaving Odessa unusually preserved. Today the town retains one of the finest collections of pre-Revolutionary architecture in the mid-Atlantic. The meetinghouse, added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-two, sits at the center of that preserved landscape, a twenty-by-twenty room that once helped change the course of American lives.