After finishing up with meeting house photographs, postcards, etc., I moved on to glass slides featuring images of Quaker meeting houses. So the problem was, how exactly does one scan glass slides? Well, luckily some of the scanners here in Special Collections are equipped to scan glass slides.  So I put the slide on the scanner, set it to the right setting pressed scan, and hoped for the best.  Unfortunately, the scanner did not recognize that there was anything there to be scanned.  Oops.  So I asked more knowledgeable people than I am, and found that I needed a plastic slide holder to make it work.  The next problem was that there were no slide holders that fit the glass slides with which I was working.  That’s when improvising seemed to be the only option.  I used a guide that fit the scanner I was using, flipped the glass slides vertically (even though the guide was oriented horizontally) and tried scanning again.  The results were not so great (see below).

So, it’s pretty and colorful, but it certainly is not an image of a meeting house.  I’m still not entirely sure what I did wrong here, but eventually I was able to get scans like the ones below…

Abington Friends Meeting House, Jenkintown, PA, 1836

Atlantic City Meeting House, Atlantic City, NJ, 1872

Everything went well with the scanning of these 3 in. by 4 in. slides (the smallest of the glass slides in the collection).  New problems arose when it came time to scan the 5 in. by 7 in. slides.  The scanner I used could only scan slides that fit between a 3.25 in.  by 10.5 in. area (a very long and narrow rectangle).  The new slides’ dimensions exceeded this constraint.

So the project hit a brick wall for a time until a scanner with the correct settings and equipment to scan the larger glass slides could be found.  The new scanner was much easier to use because no guide was needed to scan the glass slides.  I used this particular scanner for the larger 6.5 in. by 8.5 in. slides as well.

Merion Friends Meeting House, Merion, PA, 1695, remodeled 1829

Haverford Friends Meeting House, Haverford, PA, 1834, enlarged in 1894

Now all of the glass slides have been scanned and will hopefully be available on Triptych in the near future!

Throughout the year, the Quaker Meeting House Project expanded and now international meeting houses are being added to Triptych!  Joining the collection on Triptych are meeting houses from:

Austria, Barbados, Canada, England, France, Germany, Ghana, Ireland, Jamaica, Japan, Kenya, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Norway, Scotland, Tanzania, and Wales.

Many of these houses have fascinating histories, while others remain mysterious.  New images will be available on Triptych soon!

Jordans Meeting House, Jordans, England, 1688

Guben Quaker Meeting House, Guben, Germany, 1934

Congénies Quaker Meeting House (Maison Quaker de Congénies), Congénies, France, 1822

Eastbourne Meeting House, Eastbourne, England, 1939

Throughout my time with Quaker Meeting Houses, I have found a couple of oddly named ones including Old Gunpowder Meeting House in Maryland.  However, it was a meeting house in T. Chalkley Matlack’s Notebooks that made me do a double-take.  In the index to Book 12, a name jumped out at me.  “Murderkill.”  I thought that there must be some mistake. When I turned to the pages devoted to “Murderkill,” I realized that I was not mistaken.

Here is the particular passage from Book 12 that clarified things for me:

“‘A Friend writes: “The name of said Monthly Meeting I find to be variously spelled on the Quarterly Meeting records; which would be of very little importance, if they did not convey ideas essentially different from each other.  By way of explanation, it may not be improper to state that Delaware having been settled by the Swedes, their word for stream, or creek, was in many instances retained with an English prefix, – as ‘Broadkil,’ and that a bloody battle fought by the Indians on the banks of one of those streams, gave it the name of Murderkil, which name was also imparted to a district of Kent County lying on said steam, and known as Murderkil Hundred, where the Friends’ meeting-house was located in which the meeting under consideration was held.  The Friends, being a murder-hating, peace-loving, and simple-minded people, and not approving of the word murder, adopted in lieu thereof that of mother as a prefix to kil, making the name of Motherkil for this meeting.  But the word kil is often, and I believe mostly, spelled kill, which, in combination with mother, makes a very inappropriate name for a Friends’ meeting, more objectionable than the one intended to be softened and improved.  It is sometimes written Motherkiln, a name that conveys a totally different idea, and is not objectionable in itself.”‘”

The struggle to correct the name of the meeting house is quite interesting.  I have a suspicion that Matlack found this name amusing since he listed it under Murderkill (with two ls)  instead of Motherkiln.  His choice was a good one because this passage may have escaped my notice if it had been titled otherwise.

For more information about T. Chalkley Matlack’s Notebooks, click here.

In a drawer filled with folders of meeting house images, I found a  folder with four  images of Burlington Meeting House.  Three of the drawings (pictured in the thumbnails below) appear to be drawings of the  first meeting house built in 1683.  This meeting is unusual because it is hexagonal.  Throughout my time with meeting houses (and regular houses too), I have seen many rectangular and square ones, but very few hexagonal ones.  I have not been able to find any information about why they built such an oddly shaped meeting house.

Unfortunately, this unusual meeting house met its end in the 1780s, when another meeting house was built in close proximity to it.

The fourth image is a little mysterious.  I assumed when I was scanning it that it was a plan for the new Burlington Meeting House.  So I took a look at images of the building on Triptych.  I soon realized that I was wrong.  Some digging did not get me very far, which is not surprising considering that the plan is undated.  Hoping to find out more about the person who drew the plans, I tried to find information on Wm. Dillwyn.  From what I could find out, he was born in Philadelphia, and married his first wife in Burlington, NJ.  However, he lived in England when the new meeting house was built, so he may or may not have submitted this plan.  It is also possible that there was another William Dillwyn living in the area at the time.

Even without knowing the exact history of the plan, it was really interesting to see the detailed notes and drawings for a meeting house, which is something I had not come across before this image.

Regardless of the roadblocks, trying to figure out this architectural mystery was quite enjoyable.  It’s just too bad that there seems to be no clear answer.

For more images of Burlington Meeting House, check out Triptych.

Photo of Haviland Meeting House from "The American Friend" (First Month, 1897; p.79).

For the past few weeks, I have been scanning and cataloging pictures of meeting houses from all over the United States. Photographs, newspaper clippings, and post cards document the many variations of these buildings. Although they share the same function, meeting houses varied in their locations, materials, and styles.

The meeting houses that I have found were spread all over the country from Philadelphia to Seattle. Their locations in time varied too. The earliest I worked on was the High Street or Great Meeting House in Philadelphia from the 1690s!

Trying to find the histories for the meeting houses can be a daunting task, but it is very interesting to learn about how they evolved over time. Many meeting houses started out as log structures. As time passed, more permanent stone or brick structures replaced these earlier buildings.

A unique example of a more ephemeral meeting house is one in Kansas. Dating to 1885, the Haviland Friends Church started out as a building constructed of sod!

Buildings featured many different styles. Most of them were simple one or two-story buildings; however, there were some exceptions to the rule. There were several large Greek Revival buildings and a few that had Gothic details.

Working with these images has been really interesting so far. The most challenging ones are the unknown meeting houses, but it is fun to be a detective!

For more information and images of meeting houses, see Triptych.

Summer students, interns, and staff take a workshop on using "Archivist's Toolkit" from PACSCL archivist Holly Mengel

Summer is a special time in Special Collections.  Gone are the regular Haverford student and faculty researchers that we work with during the school year.  And instead we keep busy with a steady stream of visitors, including faculty and graduate students from other institutions. And we’ll soon be welcoming a group of Gest Fellows to study in the Quaker Collection.  It’s also a time when we employ a team of student assistants to do intensive work on a variety of special projects we don’t usually have time for during the school year.  This summer we have a terrific team of seven students.  Together they work about 245 hours a week, and it’s always exciting to see how much gets accomplished during this time.  Our students this summer are working on several projects: Deanna Bailey and Patrick Lozada are processing papers from the William Warder Cadbury and Catharine J. Cadbury papers; Janela Harris and Jon Sweitzer-Lamme are processing the Morris-Shinn-Maier Collection; Christina Hurley is working on the Meeting House digitization project; Abdullah Ali Khan is working on the Friendly Association records conservation and digitization project; and Karl Moll is our “jack-of-all-trades,” helping out with a number of projects including our Online Finding Aids and learning the ropes of processing College Archives materials. Like summers past, they will be meeting regularly with Professor Emma Lapsansky to discuss the historical aspects of their work.  New this summer, they will be posting regularly on this New and Noteworthy blog (some have already started!) to tell you, dear reader, about their work as they go along.  Comments are open on the blog, so we invite you to join in the conversation!