Long Plain Friends Meetinghouse

The Long Plain Friends Meetinghouse, erected ca. 1759 with a porch addition, ca. 1859, is a two story wood frame and clapboard structure with an end gable roof of medium pitch, end chimneys and regular fenestration pattern on two facades measuring 40.5 feet east to west and 28.5 feet north to south. The meetinghouse lies about one hundred feet west of the former Long Plain Road (now Main Street/Mass. Route 105 North) in Acushnet, although the edge of the lot directly abuts this road. The surrounding area is characterized by semi-rural agricultural, residential and light commercial activity, with the majority of the building stock dating from the 19th and 20th centuries.

The meetinghouse is situated facing south on approximately two and a half acres of open land and is positioned near the center of the northern edge of the property; the 1and slopes gently away from the building to the south, east, and west. The lot contains several shade trees and is mostly covered tall grass; it is entirely surrounded by a 3- to 4-foot-tall rubble stone wall, which may date back to the original construction of the building. The northeast corner of this wall rises to roughly six feet in height, indicating the former location of a carriage house or stables incorporated into it.

a structure normally accompanied a Quaker meetinghouse; this one seeins to have disappeared sometime in the 20th century, for it is just visible in a 1907 photograph of the meetinghouse contained in Franklyn Howland's history of Acushnet. Just south of the carriage house site is a ten foot cut in the eastern wall, permitting access to the property.

/Architect Unknown Statement of Significance (in one paragraph) The Long Plain Friends Meetinghouse possesses integrity of location, setting, lesign, materials, workmanship, feeling, and association. All alterations to including the interior, have been in keeping with its original and continued function. The meetinghouse retains important associations with the history of the Quaker community in Acushnet and the development of the town itself as a farming community.

As a nearly intact representative of 18th and 19th century Quaker architectural form and function,and the oldest surviving example of its type in the area, the Long Plain Friends Meetinghouse meets Criteria A and C of the National Register of Historic Places on the state and The Quakers were the second religious group to establish themselves in Acushnet in the late 17th century. The first Quaker meetinghouse in erected near the head of the Acushnet River in 1700. Much of the early 18th century development of the town as a rural farm community is directly attributable to Quaker settlement there.

Quakers remained active in local agricultural enterprises [especially apple and peach orchards, for which Acushnet was and is still reknowned] and mill industries throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, despite their steadily dwindling numbers;mnany prominent Friends, especially those Quakers involved in the whaling industry operating New Bedford, left the Quaker community for the Unitarian Church in the early 19th century when their increasing financial prosperity became incompatible with Quaker doctrine. In the middle of the 18th century, the Quaker population in the area had grown so numerous that it became feasible to establish Weekly Meetings in various locations, under the direction of the local Monthly Meetings in Dartnouth or Sandwich.

The Quakers in the Long Plain area petitioned the Sandwich Monthly Meeting in 1758 for permission to build a meetinghouse for their village.