Swansea Friends Meetinghouse & Cemetery Somerset, Massachusetts

Text courtesy of the National Register of Historic Places, a program of the National Parks Service. Minor transcription errors or changes in formatting may have occurred; please see the Nomination Form PDF for official text. Some information may have become outdated since the property was nominated for the Register.

The Swansea Friends Meetinghouse and Cemetery comprise a property that is architecturally and historically significant as a distinctive example of 18th -century meetinghouse architecture, and as an important surviving landmark in the geographical and hierarchical network of Quaker meetings in southern New England, which was one of the earliest and most successful plantings of the Society of Friends in America. The property meets National Register criteria A, B, and C at a local and state level of significance. The Swansea Friends Meetinghouse is one of only nineteen Quaker meetinghouses inventoried in the state of Massachusetts, of which there had been scores in the 19th century, and as such represents a rare surviving example of a statewide religious network of historical significance. Containing evidence of its earliest component, built in 1702, the meetinghouse is the oldest building in this group and has significance that transcends its local context. Architecturally, it now represents the form and plan of a meetinghouse built in 1746 and updated in 1889.