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.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the early 1700s, the rolling farmland of what is now Berks County sat near the edge of Pennsylvania's settled frontier. William Penn had founded his colony as a haven for Quakers and other people of conscience, and families of the Society of Friends spread inland from Philadelphia looking for good soil and room to worship in their own plain way.
The Oley Valley drew some of these earliest inland Friends. When they gathered a meeting here in 1725, they were doing what Quakers did wherever they put down roots: forming not just a congregation but the civic heart of a rural neighborhood, a place where marriages were witnessed, disputes were settled, and the dead were laid to rest.
The name change to Exeter in 1742, and the raising of a permanent stone meeting house in 1759 where log buildings had stood before, trace the ordinary arc of a frontier community growing more settled and more sure of itself. Stone meant permanence — a statement that these families intended to stay.
People & events
The burial ground here holds members of several old valley families — among them the Boones and the Lincolns, names that would later loom large in the American imagination.
The Boone family were Quakers who farmed in this part of Pennsylvania, and it was in the Oley region that the famed woodsman Daniel Boone spent his boyhood before the family moved south and west. The Lincolns, too, had deep roots in colonial Berks County; their descendants would migrate through Virginia and Kentucky over the generations, a line that eventually reached Abraham Lincoln.
What the marker records is not a single dramatic event but a slow rhythm of community life across nearly two centuries. Meetings fell silent in 1899, as many rural congregations did when families dispersed and populations shifted, and then the building was reopened for worship in 1949 — a quiet second life for a very old room.
Its place in the American story
It is easy to think of the American story as beginning on the frontier or in the halls of government. Places like this remind you that it often began in a plain meeting house, among farming families whose descendants would carry the country's story outward.
The same valley that shaped a boy who became a legend of the trans-Appalachian wilderness also nurtured the forebears of a president. That two such lineages should rest in one modest Pennsylvania churchyard is a striking illustration of how the movement westward — and the making of national figures — grew out of very local, very ordinary colonial roots.
The meeting itself embodies the Quaker imprint on early America: a faith that prized simplicity, community, and conscience, and that helped set the tone for the colony that became a cradle of American pluralism.
If you visit
Come expecting quiet. A stone Quaker meeting house is meant to be unadorned, and that plainness is the point — no steeple, no ornament, just solid walls built to outlast the people who raised them.
Walk the burial ground slowly. Quaker markers are traditionally simple, so you may find small, weathered stones rather than grand monuments. Reading the surnames is its own kind of history lesson, connecting the families beneath your feet to names you already know.
This is a place that rewards imagination over spectacle. Stand where log walls once stood before the stone ones, picture the valley as open frontier, and let the setting do the work. It fits naturally into a slow drive through the Oley Valley's historic farm country, where the landscape itself still carries the shape of its colonial past.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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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.