Daniel Boone was a Quaker?

Indeed he was. Or at least his parents were. His father eventually got read out of meeting, and there is no evidence to suggest that Daniel adhered to the Quaker faith, or that he gave much thought to religion in general. However, the meeting house where the Boones worshiped was about a mile down the road from their farm. The meeting house that I visited on Tuesday would not be the one that the Boones frequented. They probably worshiped in a log structure. This meeting house was built after the Boones had already left the area.

The Exeter Friends Meeting House was built in 1757, although the first Quakers came to the Oley Valley in 1717. My mentor Jim Lewars offered to take me to the meeting house on Tuesday, May 20, and really, I had no idea what to expect. The extent of my knowledge of the Quakers came from an article I read called “The World and William Penn,”by Edmund S. Morgan. Nevertheless I was excited. From what little I knew about the Quakers I had a few ideas about what the meeting house would look like. The Quakers don’t believe in decorating their churches (and I really don’t think that the Friends would call their meeting houses churches), so I was prepared to not see any crosses or alters. I also had a general idea of how quaker meetings took place. I knew that the Quakers don’t have an ordained clergy, and that at their meetings they allow anyone to speak.

What I found when we got inside the building didn’t surprise me. The walls, pews, everything was very plain. None of the wood was painted. The plaster walls were white. Nearly everything in the house was original. The benches were made in 1757, and I relished being able to sit on furniture that old. (Just try doing that in any museum!) The only signs of modernity were the electric lights, pamphlets, and some art projects left on a bench that children had been working on. They were collages that were drawn and decorated with words like “peace,” “simplicity,” and “the I have a dream speech.” Jim talked to us for about a half an hour and I learned quite a bit about the Quakers in that span of time. He talked about the Quaker marriage ceremony, the church structure, the way meetings progress, and he gave us a brief overview of Quaker history.But what really caught my attention was when he started talking about the Quaker church organization.

Jim explained that in the eighteenth century the Quaker churches were organized very differently from the German Lutheran and Reformed churches that were in the area, mainly because the German Lutheran and Reformed churches consisted of several leaderless congregations that were not organized at all. The Quakers however, assigned each meeting to a regional meeting that met once a month to discuss the business, changes, ideas, and day- to- day concerns of the churches. It was here that decisions were made about marriages, expulsions, transfer certificates, etc. I was surprised to hear about this apparent organization within the Quaker church because I had read for so long about how disorganized other religious groups in Pennsylvania were. As I already mentioned, the Lutheran and Reformed churches were practically leaderless, and they were being infiltrated by Moravians who posed as Lutheran and Reformed ministers. Henry Melchoir Muhlenberg and Michael Schlatter were sent to provide leadership and under their direction the churches finally created American governing bodies in the form of the Lutheran Ministerium and the Reformed Synod. I think that this subject could offer an interested researcher several good questions to answer in a paper. First of all, was the Quaker form of organization something that they created once they came to America, or was it already in place when they left Britain? Secondly, how did the Quakers respond to religious movements in the eighteenth century that threatened church organization and coherence? I'm specifically thinking of the Great Awakening here. I don't know if I'll ever get around to writing a paper in either of these topics but they are food for thought for anybody interested in the religious history of colonial America.