Exeter Friends Meeting
Exeter Township, Berks County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Established 1725 as Oley; name changed to Exeter, 1742. Present stone meeting house built 1759 near site of two previous log structures. Buried here are members of the Boone, Ellis, Hughes, Lee, and Lincoln families. Meetings discontinued 1899; building reopened for worship in 1949.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Quakers established this Berks County meeting in 1725 as "Oley," renaming it Exeter in 1742, and raised the present stone meeting house in 1759 on the site of two earlier log structures. Among those buried in its ground are members of the Boone and Lincoln families—kin to the frontiersman Daniel Boone and to the ancestors of Abraham Lincoln. After closing in 1899, the meeting reopened for worship in 1949.
Why it matters
The quiet meeting house links Pennsylvania's Quaker settlement to two families whose descendants would help carry the American story westward and into the presidency.
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Related people
- · Boone family
- · Lincoln family
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Daniel Boone Homestead
Exeter Township, PA · est. 1948
On the rolling farmland of Berks County stood the log dwelling where Daniel Boone was born in 1734 to a Quaker family of English and Welsh descent. Boone spent his first sixteen years here, learning to hunt and range the Pennsylvania woods before the family pushed south and west, skills that would carry him into legend on the trans-Appalachian frontier. The homestead endured long after the Boones departed and is preserved today by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.
Daniel Boone
Exeter Township, PA · est. 1957
Daniel Boone, born here in the Oley Valley in 1734, spent his first sixteen years on the family homestead before the Boones pushed south and west into the Carolina and Kentucky backcountry. Long before he became the legendary blazer of the Wilderness Road and a symbol of American frontier daring, he was a Pennsylvania farm boy hunting the woods of Berks County. The homestead a few miles north is preserved today as a state historic site.
Daniel Boone
Exeter Township, PA · est. 1947
Daniel Boone was born here in the Oley Valley on November 2, 1734, to a Quaker family, and spent his first sixteen years in the Pennsylvania backcountry before the family moved south. The hunting, tracking, and woodcraft he learned on this ground carried him into legend as the pathfinder of Kentucky's Wilderness Road. The homestead a few miles north is preserved as a historic site.
Lincoln Homestead
Exeter Township, PA · est. 1947
In 1733 Mordecai Lincoln—great-great-grandfather of President Abraham Lincoln—bought land in Exeter Township and built a stone house that still stands a little over a mile south of here. He served as a Berks County justice of the peace and moved in the same circle as the Boone family, being a friend of George Boone Jr., uncle of the pioneer Daniel Boone. Generations later, Lincoln himself wrote of his forebears from Berks County, Pennsylvania.