800 E Lancaster Ave
Downingtown, PA 19335, USA

Downingtown Friends Meeting House, 800 East Lancaster Ave Downingtown, Chester County, PA

Downington Friends Meeting House is representative of the single-cell building type, a form developed by the Friends during the early settlement period. Initially conceived when they followed the English format for worship and business, the single-cell type was prevalent up until the era when the American Friends created their own religious program. Different from the English program, the American Friends needed for their meeting houses to accommodate separate, defined spaces for men and women. These spaces were generally equivalent in size. For Downingtown, however, there are two caveats. It is a nineteenth-century structure and it is larger than the one-room meeting houses erected during the settlement period. This meeting house, then, signals the re-emergence of that early building form in meeting house design. It also is likely that Downingtown was the first example of this revived, but revised, building type. Although seen much earlier at Downingtown, the retrospective single-cell type characterized many of the meeting houses erected after the schism between Orthodox and Hicksite Friends in 1828. The single-cell or one-room plan was a viable solution because it readily accommodated the relatively small number of members in the new meetings created as a result of the separation, just as it had the small groups of immigrants a hundred years or so before. The interior plan of Downingtown Friends Meeting House also is reflective of earlier habits. A partition divided the space into two apartments, but it extends from side to side-running the length of the building. By the time of Downingtown`s construction, common practice among the Friends favored partitions that were oriented parallel to the gable ends, running the width rather than the length of the building. This made Downingtown`s internal organization unusual in its day. Significantly for the American Friends` programmatic needs, the placement of the partition produced two almost equal sized rooms, one each for the men`s and women`s meetings at Downingtown. At the same time as it fulfilled the American Friends` spatial requirements for two equally-sized rooms, the partition`s orientation produced an interior arrangement reminiscent of that developed for the English program wherein men and women Friends met for worship together and then separated into gender-specific groups for business meetings. In the English format, generally a larger room was required for the inclusive meetings for worship and only a smaller room needed for the women to withdraw into for business; moreover, once split into business meetings, the women Friends did not have to see the facing benches and so were not hampered by the side to side placement of the partition. Early meeting houses in southeastern Pennsylvania, such as Merion Friends Meeting House and Sadsbury Friends Meeting House, were constructed in this manner. Similarities in membership size and in the rural location of these meetings to Downingtown likely contributed to the revival of the single-cell building form, as well as the orientation of the partition, in the nineteenth-century.