Buckingham Friends Meeting House

The 1768 Quaker meeting house, still in active use

The Buckingham Friends Meeting House is the oldest building still in regular use in the township, a sturdy fieldstone structure built in 1768 in the plain style of the Quakers. The interior is exactly what you would expect: two facing banks of plain wooden benches, no altar, no decoration, no central pulpit. Meetings for worship still happen here every Sunday morning, mostly in silence as they have for over 250 years.

The adjoining Buckingham Friends School, founded in 1794, is one of the oldest continuously operating schools in the country. Visitors can walk the small cemetery and the grounds outside meeting times. The setting at the bend of Route 202 — old stone, big trees, fields — captures something essential about the Quaker corner of rural Pennsylvania.

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A story
The meeting was established in 1700, when Quaker families newly arrived from England gathered at a member's house. The current stone meeting house was completed in 1768 and has been in continuous Sunday use ever since — over 250 years of unbroken silent worship. The adjoining cemetery contains the unmarked graves of many of the earliest Bucks County settlers, including formerly enslaved people sheltered here on the Underground Railroad.