Exeter Friends Meeting: Lincoln's Ancestors Rest Here
Near Reading, Pennsylvania
This quiet stone building, set among old maples in Berks County, holds more American history than it looks like. The Exeter Friends Meeting is an early Quaker congregation in the Oley Valley, and the stone meeting house you see today dates to the eighteenth century.
Buried in the graveyard behind it are said to be members of families whose names echo through history: the Boones, the Ellises, the Hugheses, and the Lincolns. These were ancestors of Daniel Boone and of Abraham Lincoln, both of whose families passed through this Quaker community before moving west into the Pennsylvania and Virginia frontier. The meeting was later laid down for a time and has since reopened for worship, its simple interior still intact after nearly three centuries.
