Mullica Hill Historic Walking Tour

Friends Meeting House

1808 · South Main & Woodstown Road

Stop 2 of 13 · Core Loop · Old Town Hall Museum 2 min · Map · About 2 min read

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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.

The meeting house nearly hidden in trees beyond a rail fence, a porch-fronted farmhouse at left. — The Mullica Hill Friends Meeting House in an 1870-era photograph.

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 meeting 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.

The land came from Jacob Spicer, whose 1779 will set it aside for a school, 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 rehired the masons, rebuilt the gable, 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.

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 slavery.

In 1932 the meeting's First-Day School staged a play about the family of William Penn. By coincidence, the Penn family once owned the very land on which the meeting house was built.

Four children in Quaker costume, broad hats and bonnets, posed beneath a framed portrait. — The First-Day School's William Penn pageant, 1932. By a twist of history, the Penn family once held the very land under the meeting house.

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 later on this tour.

The brick meeting house and its long porch behind bare trees, low gravestones in the grass before it. — The Friends Meeting House and burying ground.

The brick meeting house today under old shade trees, its lawn open to the corner. — The Mullica Hill Friends Meeting House and grounds today.

On the Way

On the way to Stop 3, look down at 54 South Main: Waypoint B, The Letters in the Iron →

Programs at Richwood Academy

The Society's free lectures and live performances happen inside the 1870 Richwood Academy schoolhouse each spring and fall, and the talks are livestreamed and archived for anyone who cannot make it in person.

See the lineup →