The Ohio Historical Society completed the restoration of the beautiful old Friends Meeting House in Mount Pleasant in 1966 to remind the people of Ohio of one of the state's small, but very important, early groups of settlers. Standing on a hill overlooking a considerable part of Mount Pleasant, the meeting house is not only a fitting memorial to those Quakers who settled at Mount Pleasant, but also is a testimonial to that which was the vital center of their lives.

The occasion for the building of the Mount Pleasant Meeting House in 1814-1815 was to accommodate the Ohio Yearly Meeting. The movement for an Ohio Yearly Meeting began in 1806 when Ohio Friends petitioned the Baltimore Yearly Meeting to organize a quarterly meeting in Ohio. As a result, the monthly meetings at Concord, Short Creek, and Miami were authorized to form a quarterly meeting which was called the Short Creek Quarterly Meeting. The Friends at Short Creek built a quarterly meeting house in 1806-1807, a crude one-story brick structure, 45 by 70 feet in size-the largest church building in the state.

Though the first mention of a request to establish a yearly meeting west of the Allegheny Mountains appeared in the minutes of the 1810 Baltimore Yearly Meeting, no action was taken on the request. By 1811 there were four quarterly meetings west of the Alleghenies-Redstone (Pennsylvania), Short Creek, Miami, and Salem (all in Ohio)-which requested that they be permitted to form a yearly meeting. Apparently the delegates at the Baltimore Yearly Meeting believed that the question of establishing a new yearly meeting was so important that they delayed making a decision and asked for a committee from Philadelphia and Virginia yearly meetings to consider the question and advise them as to an appropriate decision. Then in 1812, the Baltimore Yearly Meeting authorized the quarterly meetings west of the Allegheny Mountains (now also including West Branch) to convene at Short Creek as a yearly meeting on the third First-Day of the eighth month, 1813.

It was estimated by some that there were over two thousand people in attendance at this first Ohio Yearly Meeting in 1813; others said that there were closer to three thousand Quakers present. Whatever the number, the Friends got down to the business of organization. Horton Howard of Short Creek was named clerk, William Wilson was chosen to assist him, and Enoch Harris was selected treasurer. It was decided to adopt the Baltimore Yearly Meeting's Book of Discipline as the guide for the Ohio Yearly Meeting until the latter group could devise a Book of Discipline of its own (which was published in 1819). The yearly meeting also established a meeting for sufferings, as well as other committees; and each quarterly meeting was assessed, according to its population, an amount sufficient to defray the operating expenses of the yearly meeting.

According to the minutes of that first yearly meeting, the men held their business sessions in a shed adjoining the Short Creek Quarterly Meeting House while the women gathered in the meeting house. Due to these primitive conditions one of the early orders of business was to consider the building of a permanent yearly meeting house. Their discussions led to the appointment of a committee on the meeting house which later purchased nearly six acres of land adjoining the village of Mount Pleasant. In 1814 construction began on the new building and in 1815 the first Ohio Yearly Meeting to be held in Mount Pleasant convened there. Construction costs-$12,345, excluding donated labor-were apportioned among the five quarterly meetings.

Jacob Ong, a carpenter and cabinetmaker by trade, was the principal architect and builder of the Mount Pleasant Yearly Meeting House. Ong, who had moved to Ohio about 1802, was both a Quaker by birth and a veteran of the American Revolutionary War. Even though most Quakers have abhorred the idea of violence and war, some have participated in wartime service. Jacob Ong returned to the Society of Friends in 1786 after having been caught up in the patriotic frenzy which accompanied America's struggle for independence.

Ong had little difficulty in designing the Mount Pleasant Meeting House because all of the Friends' meeting houses were fairly similar in style. Well proportioned and uncluttered in line, the meeting houses were plain structures which usually included a folding partition to separate women's and men's sides. The Mount Pleasant building is a model of pioneering construction, revealing early Ohio masonry, bricklaying, carpentry, joining, woodworking, and furniture-making at its best. The meeting house is not particularly impressive from the outside except for one feature its massiveness. A brick structure, it has walls twenty-four inches thick (twenty-eight inches at foundation), is two stories high, and measures 92 feet long and 60 feet wide. Practically all of the material to build it came from the surrounding countryside, and the local artisans of Mount Pleasant provided the labor force.

OHIO YEARLY MEETING, 1813

The interior arrangement of the building reveals some of the ideas of the Quakers concerning their worship services and their business meetings. The meeting house has a seating capacity of two thousand; but when yearly meeting was being held, the building nearly burst at its seams. On the main floor, on the north side of the building, is a ministers' gallery comprising three tiers of seats which face the auditorium where the members sat on stiff-backed benches. Benches in the ministers' gallery were reserved for the "pillars" of the meeting-the ministers, the elders, the overseers, and some of the older or concerned Friends. (In 1883, the ministers' gallery was replaced by a single-level platform separated by an aisle from the main room. This arrangement, quite out of character with other early Quaker meeting houses, was removed in the restoration.) Located above the main floor, at each end and along the south side of the building, are spacious galleries which were occupied by the young people (usually twelve years of age or older).

A special feature of the meeting house is its partition, which reaches from the floor to the ceiling and stretches the full sixty feet across the building. Made of paneled poplar arranged in horizontal sections, it equally divides the space between the men's side to the east and the women's side to the west. The partition was uniquely designed so that a portion of it could be raised or lowered by an intricate piece of handmade machinery. The sections in this portion were hinged so that they would fold around an axle (in the attic) which was revolved by a winch that operated an enormous cogwheel. Four husky men were required to turn the winch to pull the huge partition up into the attic.

The Ohio Yearly Meeting grew and prospered. By 1814 it was reported that there were 1,693 families within its limits, and in 1826 the yearly meeting counted 8,873 members organized into fifty-three local congregations. Each August held a special significance for the Friends because that meant it was time for the yearly meeting at Mount Pleasant and a respite, at least for a brief moment, from the backbreaking job of eking out a living in the virgin Ohio wilderness. Even though the Quakers have been known for their calmness of manner, the yearly meeting took on the appearance of a festival of sorts. Naturally it afforded Friends the opportunity to renew acquaintances with those who had moved to other parts of the state. Many romances began at yearly meeting time. Young people were sometimes chastised for their conduct during yearly meeting for "the rolling in of the carriages at midnight, so little becoming the occasion, or the children of Friends."

With the great influx of Friends the small village could not accommodate all of the visitors. Many persons slept five or six to a room when they were lucky to find a place in Mount Pleasant. Some were entertained by Quakers who lived on farms as far as five or more miles from Mount Pleasant. Often the children of a family were moved to haymows to sleep in order to accommodate more guests in the home. In later years, after the Mount Pleasant Boarding School was constructed, Friends attending the yearly meeting were permitted to sleep and eat at the school, at a charge which covered only the expenses incurred.

The festive atmosphere associated with the yearly meetings apparently continued through the years. According to an account by Jesse Spencer written to his sister from Mount Pleasant in 1846, there were then two yearly meetings-one for the Hicksites and one for the Orthodox Friends, each lasting a week and running consecutively. The roads into Mount Pleasant, he wrote, were jammed with carriages for as far out as four miles. He went on to describe:

Last Sunday was a great day in town. The shops and everything was open and the Street full ol'Mellon and Gingerbread Wagons. Beer Whiskey and everything else. lf' you know what a fair is like in Ireland. you know very near what it was like here last Sunday. . . . It would be worth while for you to be here from now till next Sunday. You would see what you never seen the like of before. Tell Bill about it. I wish you was here.

By this account, it would seem that this little Jefferson County village hummed with activity at least once or twice a year-from both the influx of Friends and the heightened community activities.

To describe the use of the meeting house in detail would be complicated because of the schisms which split the Society of Friends. As a result of the Separation of 1828 (see section on "Quaker Origins"), the Hicksites used the yearly meeting house and the Orthodox Friends were forced to meet at the quarterly meeting house at Short Creek that year. Since they jointly owned the Mount Pleasant Meeting House, both groups used it for their yearly meetings in subsequent years. Within the Orthodox branch of the Society a second schism developed in the 1840's. This split was the result of a visit to the United States by Joseph J. Gurney, an engaging, talented Quaker evangelical from England. He became a center of controversy because some Quakers considered him too close to Episcopal or Methodist doctrine and too far from the original emphasis on the "Inner Light." One who felt strongly about this matter was John Wilbur of Rhode Island who became convinced that Gurney was a threat to the concept of the "Inner Light" and the traditional beliefs of Quakers. Those who supported Gurney were called Gurneyites or Orthodox. Those who supported Wilbur became the Wilburites or Conservatives.

This controversy led to further splits, one of which occurred in Ohio in 1854 that resulted in three groups (Hicksites, Gurneyites, and Wilburites) holding title jointly to the yearly meeting house property. The Hicksites continued to hold their annual meetings in the yearly meeting house. The Gumeyites (Orthodox) met there too until 1866 when they began to alternate their annual meetings between Damascus in even years and Mount Pleasant in odd years. Late in the nineteenth century the Hicksites began alternating their meetings between Mount Pleasant in even years and Salem in the odd years. The last yearly meeting held at Mount Pleasant was
by the Hicksites in 1918.

The three groups held title jointly to the property until 1883 when the Wilburites transferred their interests to the Hicksites. In 1921, the Hicksites deeded their interest to the Gurney Friends, who deeded the property in 1950 to the state. The state of Ohio, through The Ohio Historical Society, restored the meeting house as a beautiful monument to a group of people unique in Ohio history. Members of the Evangelical Friends Church, Eastern Region, an outgrowth of the Gurneyites (Orthodox), are the only Friends in Mount Pleasant at present. The Wilburites (Religious Society of Friends) or Conservatives have their headquarters at nearby Barnesville. There are at present six yearly meetings which serve Ohio.