Radnor Friends Meeting House, Southwest corner of Sproul & Conestoga Roads, Ithan, Delaware County, PA

Significance: Constructed largely in 1718, Radnor is one of the oldest standing meeting houses in the Delaware Valley. Its form captures patterns of American Friends Meeting House development that are extant in perhaps no other structure. As was typical of many of the meeting houses of the early settlement period, Radnor began as a single-celled structure. The eastern addition to the main building of a supplemental room is reflective of the early attempts by the Society of Friends in America to develop a building form that best facilitated their unique form of worship and separate men's and women's business meetings. Motivated principally by the Friends regard for the status of women within the meeting, Radnor's telescoping form also constitutes the beginning of the evolution to the symmetrical, two-cell doubled type that became the standard for Friends Meeting House design by the late-eighteenth century. The builders of Radnor Meeting House were among the first generation of Quaker converts. Like other Welsh settlers to this area, they hoped to establish their own barony within the newly formed Pennsylvania Colony. Radnor Friends established a meeting for worship here in 1683. Elements of the meeting house they built, such as its steeply pitched roof, are indicative of the Medieval English building traditions that the Welsh Friends brought with them from their homeland.
Unprocessed Field note material exists for this structure: N820
Survey number: HABS PA-6226
Building/structure dates: 1718- 1722 Initial Construction