The brick meeting house in front of you was finished in 1808. Not long after, a great wind came through Mullica Hill and brought one whole gable end of the new building down to the ground. We know about it because of a paper read in 1897 by a Mullica Hill woman named Hope L. Moore, old enough to have heard the story directly from Friends who remembered it. The Quakers rehired the masons and rebuilt the gable. The meeting they belonged to had already been gathering on this lot since 1797, eleven years before the bricks went up, holding trial First-day worship inside a small schoolhouse that stood on land Jacob Spicer had set aside in his 1779 will for that purpose as well as a meeting house and a burying ground. By 1800 they had organized formally. By 1808 they had raised these walls. Then the wind came.
They rebuilt and kept worshipping. The meeting that gathers in this building today is the same body that started in the schoolhouse in 1797. For more than two and a quarter centuries it has held First-day worship through war, depression, schism in the wider Quaker movement, and the slow turn of the village around it. The brick has stood. The silence has held.
The burial ground beside the meeting house is older than the brick walls. It holds generations of Mullica Hill Friends, the families who built this village and ran its farms. The largest tombstone in the cemetery belongs to a man you will meet at the next stop on this tour. Mullica Hill Friends belonged to the antislavery tradition of South Jersey Quakers. Specific Underground Railroad activity at this site has not been documented in archival records, but the families who worshipped here were part of the wider regional movement to end the practice.
