Arch Street Friends Meeting House: The World's Largest Quaker Hall

One block from the Betsy Ross House stands the largest active Quaker meeting house in the world, and it sits on ground that William Penn set aside for the Religious Society of Friends before most of Philadelphia had even been built.

In seventeen oh one, Penn deeded two acres here as a burial ground for Quakers. Over the years, as many as twenty thousand people were buried on this site. The current building was constructed in eighteen oh three, designed by Owen Biddle Jr., one of America's earliest architectural writers, who worked in the plain Georgian style that Quakers preferred: no steeple, no ornament, no imagery, nothing that might distract from the inner life. The building's two wings can together seat more than three thousand people.

Quakers have buried their dead on this ground since sixteen eighty-three, and the Philadelphia Monthly Meeting has worshipped in this building since eighteen oh five. The Arch Street Meeting was for generations the spiritual center of a community that shaped Philadelphia and Pennsylvania in ways disproportionate to its size. Quakers founded Pennsylvania, built the colony's early institutions, led early opposition to slavery, and pioneered the idea, still radical in the seventeenth century, that God's light existed in every human being regardless of their station or their faith.

The meeting house became a National Historic Landmark in twenty eleven. Today it welcomes more than forty-five thousand visitors and students each year. Services are still held here in the tradition of unprogrammed Quaker worship: no clergy, no music, no sermon. Participants sit together in silence and speak when moved to do so. In a city that survived the Revolution and built the nation's founding documents two blocks away, this plain brick building quietly continues a practice nearly as old as Philadelphia itself.