Two Centuries of a Quaker Presence in Baltimore

In November 1792, a group of worshippers, gathered together in a red-brick Meetinghouse at Aisquith and Fayette Streets near the Baltimore harbor, gained official status as Baltimore Monthly Meeting of Friends. The building, erected in 1781, was soon too small for a congregation that rapidly grew. It belongs now to the City... but the influence and contributions of these early Quakers, who lived their lives in the light of their belief, also grew and influenced many aspects of Baltimore history.

The Religious Society of Friends was founded by George Fox in England in 1652. Friends, often called Quakers, believed that they could experience God directly in their lives without relying on paid clergy. They worshipped together in silence awaiting divine guidance to manifest itself; when it did, Friends stood to break the silence and speak. Believing that there is that of God in every person, Friends adhered to the authority of individual conscience over creed or law. Persecuted as nonconformists by the Church of England, many Friends sailed to America, with some landing in Maryland in 1656. By 1700, there were 3,000 Friends in Maryland. Meetinghouses, as they called their places of worship, sprang up first on the waterways of the Eastern and Western shores of Chesapeake Bay, then inland as villages, towns, and cities were established.

In 1805, twenty-four years after the doors opened on the Aisquith Street Meetinghouse -- still standing today -- Friends built another Meetinghouse, on Lombard Street, just west of "downtown" and near the site of the existing Holiday Inn. Friends worshipped on Lombard Street until a theological schism in 1828 caused some Friends to withdraw and establish a separate Meeting on Courtland Street. This group of Quakers later moved to a new Meetinghouse on Eutaw Street (next to what was then the Johns Hopkins campus and Observatory) and, in 1921, moved to their present location on North Charles Street, near the Baltimore Museum of Art, taking the name of Baltimore Monthly of Friends, Homewood. Lombard Street Friends moved in 1889 to a new location on Park Avenue, then north on Charles Street in 1944, next to Friends School, as Baltimore Monthly Meeting of Friends, Stony Run. (The theological dispute had long since become no barrier to fellowship.)

Though Friends worshipped in silence, they did not withdraw from the world. Indeed, members of both Meetings found their livelihood in the hustle and bustle of a booming port city. Through acts of individual and corporate beneficence, they returned to the city and surrounding countryside the fruits of their labors.

Early Quaker names exist on Baltimore’s map today. On the Patapsco River, Joseph, John, and Andrew Ellicott established flour mills in what would become Ellicott City. As they prospered, they built a wharf in Baltimore, established iron works, a copper mill, and a woolen mill. They sold land to John McKim for a cotton mill. In the Jones Falls valley, Elisha Tyson built grist mills near which, in Bare Hills, his nephew Isaac Tyson would discover and mine chrome. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Baltimore was home as well to many mercantile houses established by Friends such as Gerard T. Hopkins, Johns Hopkins, and Moses Sheppard. Philip E. Thomas and his brother Evan were among the founders of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Other Friends, such as the Fell brothers, Randolph Winslow, M.D., and Benjamin Lundy established shipping and importing companies, counting houses, medical practices, printing houses, banks, and insurance companies. There were manufacturers and craftsmen too -- the potter Maulden Perine, the cabinet-makers John Needles and Gerrard Hopkins, and the silver-smith Samuel Kirk.

In their conduct of business, these early Friends were guided as are Friends today by a set of religious principles and practices that included strictures against activities such as betting and gambling, capital punishment, slavery, and all forms of war. They stood for integrity in business, penal reform, plainness of dress and language, relief of suffering, social order, and temperance. As today, all business decisions were reached by "the sense of the Meeting." These historic testimonies led the Society of Friends to be activists in causes that are today at the forefront of Baltimore's consciousness.

In their earliest business meetings (and through their wills), Friends expressed a concern for education, the orphaned, the ill, the elderly, and the poor. Johns Hopkins left funds for establishing the Johns Hopkins University and Hospital. Moses Sheppard founded what became the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital. Forty Quaker women founded the Baltimore Branch of the Y.W.C.A. In 1840, Quaker women started the Association of Female Friends for the Relief of the Sick and Helpless Poor. From the estates of Jonathan K. Taylor and Joseph C. Townsend came money to establish homes for the elderly that preceded Broadmead, a flourishing retirement community built, in 1979, in Cockeysville, Maryland.

Quakers have always tried to be friends to Native Americans. As early as 1795, Baltimore Friends were an active part of a larger Quaker committee to work in securing full rights for Native Americans. Philip E. Thomas assisted the Iroquois and Six Nations Tribes in securing 52,000 acres in New York State in 1839. Friends helped to establish the Baltimore American Indian Center in 1968.

Likewise Quakers have tried to ameliorate the injustice done to Africans brought to America as slaves. Elisha Tyson was tireless in his work to free and assist Blacks. (At his death in 1824, it was reported that 10,000 Blacks walked behind the hearse as his body was taken to Friends Burial Ground on Aisquith Street.) Friends Courtland Street Meetinghouse became the site of the Baltimore Normal School for the Education of Colored Teachers, the forerunner of Bowie State University. In our century, Friends have worked for civil rights and the empowerment of all peoples.

Early Friends were concerned for the education of all children, male and female. For the "guarded education" of their own children, Friends School was established in 1784. McKim's School was opened in 1821 as the first free school in Baltimore to educate indigent youth. Martha Ellicott Tyson was a founder of Swarthmore College. M. Carey Thomas founded Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore and became the first female president of Bryn Mawr College. Because women were refused degrees from Johns Hopkins University, she and four other Baltimore women pledged to raise $500,000 for Hopkins if the medical school would agree to admit women on an equal basis to men. It did. They raised the money!

In the twentieth century, Baltimore Quakers were active not only in opposing war but in striving to eliminate the causes of war. Friends have urged conscientious objection and alternative service in both World Wars and during the Korean and Vietnam Wars. They organized relief services and tried to affect the political process through vigils and demonstrations and such organizations as the Friends Committee on National Legislation and the American Friends Service Committee. The quest for world peace and order continues at all levels. A "Turn In The Guns" campaign, undertaken with other religious communities, is just one continuing effort Baltimore Quakers are sponsoring in order to seek a world free from violence . . .and where all may live in peace.

The panels accompanying this article were on display at the Enoch Pratt Free Library and were commissioned as part of the Baltimore Monthly Meetings' Bicentennial Celebration. Further information about local Friends is found in a 1992 hostory of Baltimore Quakers titled MINUTE BY MINUTE. Copies are available for loan from the Pratt Library or from either:

Homewood Friends Meeting 3107 North Charles Street Baltimore, MD 21219 (410) 235-4438

Stony Run Friends Meeting 5116 North Charles Street Baltimore, MD 21210 (410) 435-3773