History Spotlight
Early Churches in Marple Written by Doug Humes
T
he early settlement of Pennsylvania, like Massachusetts, was primarily driven by religion. People with views different from the mainstream in England, the Puritans and Quakers, were attacked, beaten, jailed and even martyred for their religious beliefs. The Puritans fled to New England, the Quakers to Pennsylvania. Marple was settled in the late 17th century by these Quakers, seeking freedom from persecution, and William Penn’s promise of religious tolerance in his Holy Experiment.
Early stone meeting house that replaced original log structure. photo credit: Ashmead’s History of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, 1862
While no early diaries have yet been found from that period, the Quakers who arrived were great recordkeepers. Those early records, preserved in the archives at Swarthmore and Haverford Colleges, shed light on the early churches, which the Quakers refer to as “meeting houses.” The first minutes, on September 11, 1682, note that the earliest settlers agreed to meet in Chester on every “first day” – the Quaker term for Sunday. On those Sundays, the family would ride, in a carriage if they had one, or on horseback, or by walking, the 9 miles to Chester, and return the same way, after sitting silently for worship for several hours, and then socializing with far-flung neighbors whom they would only see once a week. As the communities developed, separate meeting houses were built in Haverford (1688), Radnor (1693), Providence – now Media (1700), Springfield (1703), and Newtown (1711). Marple Quakers never had their own meeting house, but they were surrounded by nearby alternatives. A classified ad in the February 14, 1765 issue of the Pennsylvania Gazette noted that a 190-acre Marple farm for sale was located “very convenient to Mills and Meeting houses, viz. Quakers,
Quaker worship photo credit: Newtown Square Friends Meeting
Presbyterians, and to Churches,” but to our knowledge, the Presbyterians in Marple did not have sufficient numbers to justify their own building until 1835, when the Marple Presbyterian Church was first authorized, with the notation that “the Church… is in a very interesting region remote from any Presbyterian Church.” For the first 150 years, the Quakers were the dominant religious presence in Marple. And if you peek inside any of these old meeting houses today, you will still find Quaker descendants of those early settlers. For more information on the history of Marple, visit the Marple Historical Society website and Facebook page, and join the society to keep up to date on coming events: www.MarpleHistoricalSociety.org. M
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