You hear it before you understand it: silence. Eighty people sit in unpainted pine pews under high white walls at Fourth and Arch in old Philadelphia, and nobody speaks. The benches creak. A bus sighs past on Arch Street. Somewhere across the room a woman stands, says one sentence about patience, and sits down again. This is unprogrammed Quaker worship, more or less unchanged since George Fox stood in a Leicestershire field in 1647 and told a crowd to wait on the Light inside themselves. The meeting house was built in 1804, on land William Penn handed to the Religious Society of Friends in 1693. Three centuries on, Friends still gather here every First Day. The city around them was their idea.
The Place
Philadelphia sits between two rivers, the Delaware to the east and the Schuylkill to the west, on a flat plain that William Penn personally walked in 1682 and laid out as a grid. He drew five public squares (now Franklin, Washington, Rittenhouse, Logan, and Centre, the last renamed for City Hall), two wide axial streets (Broad and High, now Market), and named most cross streets after the trees that grew there: Walnut, Chestnut, Spruce, Pine. The original “Philadelphia plan” of 1682 is, by some counts, the first deliberately planned grid city in the British colonies, and it still organises the modern downtown.
Beyond the city, Quaker country fanned out across the Delaware Valley. To the west and north sat the Welsh Tract, a 40,000-acre Welsh-speaking Quaker zone in what is now Lower Merion, Haverford, Radnor, and the Main Line. To the north sat Bucks County, with its Quaker towns at Newtown, Doylestown, and Wrightstown. To the south and west sat Chester and Delaware counties, both thick with stone Friends meetinghouses still standing in farmland turned suburb. The SEPTA regional rail still runs out to most of these places.
How Philadelphia Became Quaker
A movement that began in England
The Religious Society of Friends began in the English north Midlands in the late 1640s. George Fox, a Leicestershire shoemaker’s apprentice turned itinerant preacher, started in 1647 to tell people that God spoke directly to every human conscience and that they did not need a priest, a steeple-house, or a paid minister to hear it. By 1652, when Fox climbed Pendle Hill in Lancashire and saw, he said, “a great people to be gathered”, the movement had a name and a base at Swarthmoor Hall in Cumbria.
It also had enemies. Quakers refused to swear oaths, refused to remove their hats to social superiors, refused to pay tithes to the Church of England, and refused to stop holding their own meetings for worship. Under the 1662 Quaker Act and the 1664 Conventicle Act, thousands were jailed. By the 1670s an estimated 15,000 had been imprisoned in England. Fox himself spent years in cells at Derby, Launceston, Lancaster, and Worcester.
Penn’s charter, 1681
William Penn was not the obvious candidate to found an American colony. He was the son of an English admiral, Oxford-educated, briefly a courtier, and then, at 22, a Quaker convert who had been imprisoned in the Tower of London for writing a pamphlet against Anglican orthodoxy. When his father died in 1670, the Crown owed the Penn family a debt of around 16,000 pounds. In March 1681, Charles II settled it by handing Penn a charter to a vast tract of land west of the Delaware River, naming it Pennsylvania (Penn’s Woods) for the admiral.
Penn called it a Holy Experiment. He wanted a colony where Quakers, Mennonites, German Pietists, and any other persecuted Christians could worship freely, vote, hold office, and own land. He wrote a Frame of Government in 1682 that guaranteed trial by jury, freedom of religion, and elected assemblies. He sailed for Philadelphia on the Welcome in August 1682 and stepped ashore at New Castle on 27 October.
Founding Philadelphia, 1682
Within weeks of his arrival, Penn met the Lenape leader Tamanend, sachem of the Turtle Clan, in the riverside village of Shackamaxon, what is now Fishtown. The tradition, repainted by Benjamin West a century later and remembered for generations through a great elm tree, holds that Penn and Tamanend exchanged promises of peace under that tree in 1682. The elm blew down in a storm in 1810. An obelisk marks the spot today, in Penn Treaty Park along the Delaware.
The city itself was laid out the same autumn by Penn and his surveyor Thomas Holme. Lots went on sale in London and Bristol almost immediately. Ships started arriving in 1682 and 1683, carrying Quaker weavers from Yorkshire, farmers from Cheshire and Derbyshire, ironworkers from Bristol, and Welsh-speaking gentry from Merionethshire and Montgomeryshire. By 1685 the city had 7,000 settlers. By 1700 it had a working port, brick rowhouses, paved streets, and a Quaker political class that ran the colony.
The Welsh Tract
Around 1681, before he ever sailed, Penn made a verbal agreement with a group of Welsh Quaker gentlemen for a 40,000-acre tract west of the Schuylkill where the inhabitants could “transact all affairs in our own tongue”. They came in waves from Merioneth, Montgomery, Radnor, and Denbigh, settling Lower Merion, Haverford, Radnor, and Gwynedd through the 1680s and 1690s. The Welsh Tract never got its promised self-government; by the 1690s Pennsylvania’s growing administration had partitioned it into ordinary counties. But the place names stuck. Bryn Mawr, Bala Cynwyd, Narberth, Berwyn, Radnor, Haverford. Drive the Main Line today and the road signs read like a map of north Wales.
The Quaker century
From roughly 1690 to 1750, Quakers were the dominant elite in Philadelphia. They controlled the Provincial Assembly, the merchant houses on Front Street, the shipping wharves, the iron forges in Bucks and Chester counties, and most of the land. They built the meetinghouses, the almshouses, and the schools. They negotiated with the Lenape, the Susquehannocks, and (less successfully, after Penn’s death) with each new wave of Scots-Irish settlers pushing west into the backcountry.
Daily life was visibly plain. Friends wore undyed wool, addressed each other as “thee” and “thou” (the familiar form, levelled across class), refused titles, and would not bow or tip their hats. Their meetinghouses had no altars, no pulpits, no stained glass, no music, no clergy. Marriages were declared by the couple themselves before the Meeting. Children were named without baptism. The months were numbered, not named: October was the Tenth Month, because the names came from Roman gods.
Germantown, 1688
In April 1688, four Quakers in Germantown, an outlying German-Dutch settlement north of the city, wrote a short petition against the slave trade. Francis Daniel Pastorius, a young attorney from Frankfurt, and three Dutch-speaking Mennonite-Quakers named Garret Hendericks, Derick op den Graeff, and Abraham op den Graeff signed it. They sent it up to the Dublin Monthly Meeting, then the Philadelphia Quarterly Meeting, then the Burlington Yearly Meeting in New Jersey. Each tier passed it on without ruling. It is the first known protest against African slavery written by a religious body in the English colonies.
The petition was filed away and forgotten for 156 years. It was rediscovered in 1844 and became a touchstone of the abolitionist movement. In the meantime, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting moved, very slowly, toward the position Pastorius had held in 1688. In 1758 the Yearly Meeting condemned the slave trade. In 1776, the same summer the Continental Congress was meeting four blocks away, the Yearly Meeting directed all member Friends to free any people they held in slavery, on pain of disownment. By 1780, almost no Philadelphia Quaker still held slaves.
The Landmarks
Arch Street Friends Meeting House (320 Arch Street). Built in 1804 to designs by Quaker master builder Owen Biddle Jr., on a lot William Penn had deeded to Friends in 1693 as a burial ground for plague victims. It is the oldest Quaker meetinghouse continuously in use in the United States and remains the largest in the world. Philadelphia Yearly Meeting still gathers here every spring. Walk in any Sunday morning and you can sit on the benches.
Free Quaker Meeting House (500 Arch Street). A small Federal-style brick building at Fifth and Arch, built in 1783 by the Free Quakers, sometimes called the Fighting Quakers, who had been disowned by the main Meeting for supporting the American Revolution. Betsy Ross was a member. George Washington and Benjamin Franklin both contributed to its construction. It held its last worship service in 1836 and is now part of Independence National Historical Park.
Pennsylvania Hospital (800 Spruce Street). Founded in 1751 by the Quaker physician Dr. Thomas Bond and his friend Benjamin Franklin (who lobbied the Assembly and put up the matching funds). It was the first hospital in the British colonies and one of the first general hospitals anywhere to treat the poor, the sick, and the mentally ill free of charge. The original 1755 Pine Building is still in use.
Friends Hospital (4641 Roosevelt Boulevard). Founded by Philadelphia Quakers in 1813 as the Asylum for the Relief of Persons Deprived of the Use of Their Reason, on a 50-acre farm in what was then countryside northeast of the city. It was the first private psychiatric hospital in the United States and pioneered the Quaker practice of moral treatment: kindness, occupation, and dignity instead of restraint. The hospital and its grounds are a National Historic Landmark.
Friends Center (1501 Cherry Street). The administrative heart of modern Philadelphia Quakerism, opened in 1856 as Race Street Meeting House and rebuilt around it through the 20th century. It houses the offices of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, the American Friends Service Committee, and Friends General Conference, along with worship space still used weekly.
Haverford, Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr. Three liberal arts colleges in the western suburbs, all on Quaker foundations. Haverford was founded in 1833 as a men’s college, the oldest college of Quaker origin in the United States. Swarthmore was founded in 1864 as a coeducational college (radical for its day). Bryn Mawr was founded in 1885 as a women’s college by members of Haverford’s board, on the same Welsh-named land Penn had granted the Welsh Quakers two centuries earlier. The three still form the Tri-College Consortium.
Where They Came From
The first wave of Friends to Philadelphia, from roughly 1682 to 1710, came overwhelmingly from England. The biggest clusters were Yorkshire (especially around Settle and the West Riding, where some of the earliest Fox converts lived), Cheshire, Derbyshire, Lancashire, and Bristol, then England’s second port and a major Quaker stronghold. London Friends came too, often as merchants. So did Welsh-speakers from Merionethshire, Montgomeryshire, and Radnorshire, who settled the Welsh Tract.
A smaller but important Irish contingent arrived from Ulster and the south, mostly from the English-speaking Quaker settlements at Mountmellick, Lurgan, and around Dublin. After about 1710 the religious flow slowed as English persecution eased, and Pennsylvania’s later 18th-century immigration was dominated by German-speaking Lutherans and Reformed (the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch), and by Scots-Irish Presbyterians who pushed west toward the Susquehanna and beyond. The Quaker core, by then, was Philadelphia-born.
Philadelphia Today
There are not many Quakers left in Philadelphia in absolute terms. Philadelphia Yearly Meeting today counts roughly 11,000 members across eastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland’s Eastern Shore. That is a tiny fraction of a metropolitan region of 6 million people, in a city now home to Black Baptist and AME congregations, Italian and Polish Catholics, Russian and Greek Orthodox, Jewish reform and conservative synagogues, Muslim mosques, Hindu temples, and large numbers of people with no religion at all.
And yet the Quaker imprint is everywhere. The city grid is Penn’s. The street names are Penn’s. The principle that a city government should not tax a church or test an officeholder for faith is Penn’s. The American Friends Service Committee, headquartered on Cherry Street, still operates worldwide in disaster relief, refugee resettlement, and conflict mediation, work for which it shared the 1947 Nobel Peace Prize with the British Friends Service Council. The colleges at Haverford, Swarthmore, and Bryn Mawr are among the best in the country. Friends schools at Germantown, Abington, Westtown, and Moorestown educate thousands of children, most of them not Quaker. The plain pine benches at Arch Street are still full on First Day morning, with retirees and undergraduates and young families and the occasional curious visitor sitting in shared silence.
The Holy Experiment never ended. It just became the background hum of the city it founded.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did the Quakers settle in Philadelphia?
English Quakers settled Philadelphia because William Penn, himself an English Quaker convert, received a 1681 royal charter from Charles II for a vast tract of land in America and founded Pennsylvania as a Holy Experiment in religious tolerance. Quakers in England were being jailed by the thousands under the 1662 Quaker Act and the 1664 Conventicle Act, and Pennsylvania offered free worship, voting rights, and cheap land. Penn laid out Philadelphia in 1682 and ships began arriving with Quaker settlers within weeks.
Are there still Quakers in Philadelphia today?
Yes, though Friends are now a small minority of a major metropolis. Philadelphia Yearly Meeting has roughly 11,000 members across the Delaware Valley, and the historic Arch Street Meeting House at Fourth and Arch holds weekly worship and the annual Yearly Meeting. The American Friends Service Committee, Friends General Conference, and dozens of Friends schools and colleges remain active. The Quaker imprint on Philadelphia’s civic, educational, and reform institutions is much larger than the current membership numbers suggest.
What are the most famous Quaker landmarks in Philadelphia?
The Arch Street Friends Meeting House at 320 Arch Street is the oldest Quaker meetinghouse in continuous use in the United States, built in 1804 on land Penn granted in 1693. Other key landmarks include the Free Quaker Meeting House at Fifth and Arch (1783), Pennsylvania Hospital at Eighth and Spruce (1751, the first hospital in the British colonies), Friends Hospital on Roosevelt Boulevard (1813, the first private psychiatric hospital in the country), and the Friends Center at 1501 Cherry Street. The Quaker colleges of Haverford, Swarthmore, and Bryn Mawr sit on the old Welsh Tract west of the city.
Where in England did the Philadelphia Quakers come from?
The largest groups of English Quaker emigrants to Philadelphia between 1682 and 1710 came from Yorkshire, Cheshire, Derbyshire, Lancashire, Bristol, and London. A substantial Welsh-speaking Quaker contingent came from Merioneth, Montgomery, and Radnor in north and mid Wales and settled the Welsh Tract west of the Schuylkill. A smaller Irish Quaker contingent came from Mountmellick, Lurgan, and Dublin.
When did the Quakers first arrive in Philadelphia?
William Penn arrived on the Welcome in October 1682 and laid out the city that autumn. Quaker settlers began arriving in numbers the same year and through 1683, mostly from the English Midlands, Bristol, London, and Wales. By 1685 Philadelphia had around 7,000 inhabitants, and by 1700 Quakers were the dominant political and commercial elite of the colony.
What was the Germantown Quaker Petition of 1688?
The 1688 Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery was a short document written by four Friends in Germantown, just north of Philadelphia: Francis Daniel Pastorius, Garret Hendericks, Derick op den Graeff, and Abraham op den Graeff. It is the first known protest against African slavery written by a religious body in the English colonies. Philadelphia Yearly Meeting filed it away without ruling, but it foreshadowed the same Meeting’s 1776 decision to require all member Friends to free anyone they held in slavery.
If your family’s story passed through Quaker Philadelphia, or any of the English Midlands, Welsh, or Irish meetings that sent Friends to the Delaware Valley, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a steeple-house in Yorkshire to a meetinghouse on Arch Street, to wherever you are now.