Great Friends Meeting House

The meeting house is the oldest surviving house of worship in Rhode Island. In keeping with Quaker notions of "plain style" living, the building lacks adornments like pulpits, statuary, steeples, or stained glass. It features wide-plank floors, plain benches, a balcony, a beam ceiling, and a shingle exterior.[3]

The original building measured two stories tall and about forty-five feet square, with a steeply pitched hip roof with a turret at the junction of the four roof slopes. Inside, massive framing timbers measure twelve inches square by forty-five feet long, supporting an open worship space with a second-floor gallery on three sides.[1]

The Quaker community in Newport largely controlled the culture and politics of the town in the 17th and 18th centuries, and many Quakers lived nearby in the historic "Easton's Point" section of Newport, where their houses have survived. The meeting house was built on land owned by Nicholas Easton who donated his land in the 1670s. It is likely Easton's house nearby on Farewell Street was used for the first Quaker meeting house before the current meeting house was built in 1699.[3]

Upon its completion in 1699, the meeting house was the largest structure of any kind between Boston and New York.[3]

Significant additions were made in 1730, 1807, 1857, and 1867 to accommodate the New England Yearly Meeting of Friends.[3] The turret was removed in 1806.[1]

The meeting house was used as a house of worship until the New England Yearly Meeting of Friends departed in 1905. The local African American community used the building as a community center until the 1970s when architect Orin M. Bullock restored the building, and in 1971 its owner Mrs. Sydney L. Wright donated the structure to the Newport Historical Society.[3]

In 2005 a dendrochronology survey of the building's tree rings confirmed a 1699 construction date.[1]

• 
  Interior of the meeting house
• 
  The Great Friends Meetinghouse pictured in 1852

• List of the oldest buildings in Rhode Island
• Oldest churches in the United States
• Portsmouth Friends Meetinghouse Parsonage and Cemetery

• Newport Historical Society meeting house website
• Mrs. William P. Buffum, "The Story of the Old Friends' Meeting House," Bulletin of the Newport Historical Society, Number 40, April, 1922
• Listing with photographs, floor plans, and historical data at the Historic American Buildings Survey