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Colonial AmericaAmerican Revolution

Radnor Meeting House

Radnor Township, Delaware County, Pennsylvania

Marker Inscription

A center of Friends' activities since 1686. The second house, built about 1721, served as an officers' house and a hospital for the Valley Forge encampment.

Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission

The Story

Quakers — the Society of Friends — have gathered on this ground since 1686, only a few years after Pennsylvania's founding, making Radnor Meeting one of the oldest Friends communities in the region. The stone meetinghouse standing from about 1721 saw its quiet worship interrupted by war: during the brutal winter of 1777–78, when Washington's army lay at nearby Valley Forge, the building served as an officers' quarters and a hospital for the sick and wounded. It is a place where two strands of Pennsylvania's identity — Quaker pacifism and Revolutionary sacrifice — met under one roof.

Why it matters

Radnor Meeting House ties the founding Quaker settlement of Penn's colony directly to the suffering of the Continental Army at Valley Forge, embodying Pennsylvania's dual heritage of faith and revolution.

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Related events

  • · Valley Forge encampment

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Nearby & related markers

St. David's Church

Radnor Township, PA · est. 1947

Built in 1715 by Welsh Episcopalians who had come to Penn's colony in search of land and religious freedom, St. David's Church became one of the enduring landmarks of Pennsylvania's "Welsh Tract." Its weathered stones and quiet churchyard so moved Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that he immortalized the place in verse. The churchyard is also the final resting place of General "Mad" Anthony Wayne, the fiery Revolutionary War commander whose remains were carried here from Erie in 1809, years after his death.

Harriton

Lower Merion Township, PA · est. 1947

This early Georgian house went up in 1704, when the Welsh Quaker settlements of the Philadelphia countryside were barely a generation old, and later took its name from owner Richard Harrison. Its most consequential resident arrived in 1774: Charles Thomson, who would serve as Secretary of the Continental Congress through the entire Revolution, keeping the young nation's official records. He lived out his long retirement here until 1824, a founding-era figure quietly farming outside Philadelphia.

Liberty Tree

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Edward Hector

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