Synopsis
On the Southwest corner of Fifth and Arch Streets in the City of Philadelphia, there stands a small substantially built brick Meeting House, which has for many years been occupied by the Apprentices’ Library Company. The gable end of the building fronts on Arch Street, and has built into it a marble tablet bearing this inscription:
“By General Subscription,
For the Free Quakers, erected,
In the year of our Lord, 1783,
Of the Empire 8.”
Nearly every building of the old City has, since this date, been torn down and replaced by edifices suited to the changing needs of commerce; but this house stands, the memorial of a past age, and is the only monument now left of the heroism of certain members of the Religious Society of Friends, in the stormy time of the Revolutionary War. The story is now nearly forgotten, and if not recorded may perhaps soon be lost entirely, and it is for the purpose of preventing this; and to answer questions which the author of these notes has often been asked as to the origin of the Free Quakers, that he now attempts to revive from the torn and faded records of the old times, the history of that Society.
