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Germantown Friends Meeting House, 47 West Coulter Street, Philadelphia, Philadelphia County, PA

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Germantown Friends Meeting House, 47 West Coulter Street, Philadelphia, Philadelphia County, PA

description

Summary

Significance: Germantown is a fine example of a mid-nineteenth century urban meeting house. It was built between 1868 and 1869 by master builder Hibberd Yarnall, and designed by Addison Hutton, one of Philadelphia's most accomplished Quaker architects. The commission was awarded to the firm of Slan & Hutton just as Addison Hutton was in the process of dissolving his partnership with Samuel Sloan, under whom he had apprenticed. This structure may thus be one of Hutton's earliest independent works and it is likely the only Friends meeting house he designed. The meeting house maintains an austerity commensurate with the Quaker tenet of simplicity. However, it also exhibits elements of the high-style Italianate villas planned by well-known architects of the period, including Sloan & Hutton, for the city's rising class of businessmen and industrialists. The construction of Germantown marks a significant shift in meeting house layout. Instead of erecting a partition in the center of the room to accommodate separate men's and women's business meetings as was typical of Friends meeting house design, the Germantown plan combined a main meeting room for worship and women's business with a rear "Committee Room" for the men's business meeting. The plan also deviated from the prototypical design by running the facing benches the width, and not the length, of the building. Void of a partition or gallery, the main meeting room is almost church-like in its spaciousness and orientation. The design reflects the tendency among some meetings that began in the late-nineteenth century to adopt mainstream ecclesiastical architecture. By the late-nineteenth century, Germantown was a center of elite Quaker society, and, at a time when many meetings were in decline, it was growing significantly. Although the Society of Friends had maintained a meeting house in Germantown since 1690, the new members were part of a migration of affluent urbanites who fled the increasingly congested city of Philadelphia for developing suburban neighborhoods. The distinctive, architect-designed meeting house reflected the rising affluence of the Germantown Friends, just as its location foretold of the upcoming shift in Quaker demographics.
Unprocessed Field note material exists for this structure: N826
Survey number: HABS PA-6654
Building/structure dates: 1868- 1869 Initial Construction
Building/structure dates: 1902 Subsequent Work

date_range

Date

1933 - 1970
person

Contributors

Historic American Buildings Survey, creator
Hutton, Addison
Sloan & Hutton
Yarnall, Hibberd
Price, Virginia Barrett, transmitter
Lavoie, Catherine C, historian
Boucher, Jack E, photographer
Ienulescu, Irina Madalina, delineator
Larkin, Cleary, delineator
McGrath, James, delineator
Schweitzer, Elaine, delineator
Willard, Kelly, delineator
Arzola, Robert, project manager
place

Location

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States40.03237, -75.17212
Google Map of 40.0323685, -75.1721204
create

Source

Library of Congress
copyright

Copyright info

No known restrictions on images made by the U.S. Government; images copied from other sources may be restricted. http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/res/114_habs.html

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