Penn Charter and George School Students ’share’ a very old building.
[This contracted piece appeared in the Penn Charter Alumni magazine, Penn Charter Today, Spring 2009 edition. The images are owned by Charles S. Hough, and used here by permission. Here is the PDF version; only for very fast connections.]
In the pre-rush hour dawn of July 10, 1972, a police escort and two flatbed trucks carrying eight magnificent hand-hewn wooden trusses from the Twelfth Street Meetinghouse inched north, throwing a shadow on Center City Philadelphia for the last time. The centuries-old roof trusses—measuring 20 feet high by 58 feet wide—wound their way north from Twelfth and Market streets, veering in and out of parked cars and beneath overhead cables, turned right on Spring Garden, then north on Delaware Avenue, the entire caravan seeking the breathing room of Interstate 95 and the final destination. The new home of the Meetinghouse would not be William Penn Charter School, whose students and faculty had used the Twelfth Street Meetinghouse for 50 years, from 1875 to 1925, prior to the school’s move to its present location. The Meetinghouse’s new home was destined to be George School in Bucks County, 35 miles up the Interstate. How the complex move occurred is a fascinating story. Why the building didn’t end up on School House Lane is a question often posed by members of the current Penn Charter community. The answer, like much of Penn Charter history, is recorded in a leather-bound volume of the Minute Book, the recorded minutes of meetings of the school’s Overseers.
Handling the Herculean move and reconstruction process was Charles S. Hough, a 1944 George School graduate and a founder of Hayes & Hough Architects. Hough later served as the principal architect for Penn Charter, from 1975 to 1995, and his son, Paul H. Hough OPC ’77, has also been an enthusiastic supporter of the school. Hough orchestrated every aspect of the de-construction and move as well as the reconstruction of the Twelfth Street Meetinghouse at George School. Workers began with the roof, peeling off one layer at a time. After the wooden “skeleton” of the roof was fully exposed, they dismantled the rafters and the horizontal timbers, leaving the trusses—the thick triangular vertebrae of the roof—visible from below. 
They reinforced the trusses and lowered them to the ground, wrapped the entire assembly in polyethylene and laid them on flatbed trucks. Brick by brick, workers dismantled the façade of the building, carefully chipping away the mortar and saving the bricks for future use.
The crew salvaged most of the building’s structure and historically significant artifacts and transported them to George School for reuse. The materials included the eight trusses, exterior doors and hardware, porches and marble steps, exterior trim, windows and shutters, stone paving bricks, about 50 percent of the exterior bricks, several foot-scrapers, wainscoting and stair railings, pine floorboards, many of the wooden benches and cushions, and the facing bench. Capping off a remarkable list of items was a floor joist, signed “1755 AC + IC” —initials for Abraham Carlisle, the master carpenter, and Isaac Coates, his apprentice. The carpenters’ initials were formed by handmade nails driven into the face of the beam, a pre “John Hancock” of sorts. (Some perspective: The Boston patriot John Hancock would not attach his prominent signature to the bottom of the Declaration of Independence at Independence Hall, a few blocks away, for another 21 years.)
Once relocated to George School, the smaller parts were stored in the school’s old cow barn, while the trusses were stored in a temporary, weatherproof shelter in the woods. Work began in the spring of 1973 and concluded the following year. The arch
itects and George School officials emphasized a recycling and “greening” philosophy that was rare in its time. The builders relied heavily on meticulous architectural notes, diagrams and photographs of the Twelfth Street structure. The building was modernized, but Hough worked to retain the harmony and spirit of the original. Hough opened up the pitched part of the roof and exposed the bottom half of the trusses to the gathered meeting below. Honoring the value of honest work and the resiliency of good craft, Hough embedded Carlisle’s initialed joist in the wall directly above the facing bench.
On September 24, 1974, a little more than two years after that pre-dawn journey from Center City, the George School community rededicated the structure, providing future gene
rations of friends, faculty and schoolchildren the opportunity to worship and assemble in one of America’s most notable meeting houses.
The Meetinghouse that now resides on a gentle hill amidst a cluster of trees on the George School campus can trace much of its material to the original 1812 structure at 20 South Twelfth Street. Some of its material—six of the eight trusses and some of the floor beams—dates even further back in time to The Great Meeting House. That predecessor, a smaller structure erected in 1755 at Second and Market, or High Street as Market was then called, was the principal place of Quaker worship during the Revolution and the presidency of George Washington. In fact, the Great Meeting House site was in use well before 1755, and older meeting houses on the plot can be traced back to 1695, predating the city’s Colonial courthouse, which was built nearby in 1707. Centuries later, the Twelfth Street Meetinghouse is now into its third decade in the care of George School—and the building has been magnificently restored and cared for and looks as if it has always existed in that zip code.
Henry Cadbury, a Quaker historian and birthright member of Twelfth Street Meeting—and also an 1899 graduate of Penn Charter—documented the centrality of the building to Penn Charter and the Friends community in a paper presented in 1962 at the Twelfth Street Meetinghouse in honor of its 150th anniversary. “The worship and ministry and the organized life of the meeting differed little from thos
e of other meetings in the city or out of it,” Cadbury wrote. “The most distinctive features were perhaps what I might call extra-curricular—organizations loosely attached to it or located near. Two of these connections are particularly conspicuous, each lasting about a half century. One was the William Penn Charter School, whose staff and students attended midweek meeting in this house every Wednesday in term time. . . . The other major connection . . . is the American Friends Service Committee from 1917 to 1960.”
Since 1917, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) has organized humanitarian and relief endeavors around the globe, fighting for social justice, human rights and peace in some of the world’s most violent and disadvantaged places. In 1947, AFSC received the Nobel Peace Prize, along with the British Friends Service Council, on behalf of Quakers worldwide, and Cadbury accepted the prize on behalf of AFSC. Not bad for an organization that migrated from the Friends Institute next door, to the lobby of the Twelfth Street Meetinghouse, to the dining room, and finally to small offices in the Meetinghouse’s attic, girded, literally, by those giant trusses. In the spring of 1975, AFSC moved into the Friends Center, a modern-looking structure adjacent to the Race Street Meeting House.
As Cadbury noted, Penn Charter students and teachers attended meeting “in this house” from 1875 when Penn Charter built a new schoolhouse at the corner of 12th and Market until 1925 when Penn Charter departed Center City for the green space of Germantown. School documents from the late 1800s explain the reason for the move: Headmaster Richard Mott Jones believed the school should offer students physical education and sports as part of the curriculum, but the Center City school did not have adequate space. Mott looked for short-term fixes—including trying to get permission from the Pennsylvania Railroad YMCA to use a playing field at its 52nd Street Station—and advocated for a long-term solution: 20 to 30 acres of land outside Center City. The school acquired acreage on School House Lane and, in the early part of the 20th century, began using the property for athletic fields. Mott Jones, who resigned in 1917 because of poor health, did not live to see the move to the new property in 1925.
In the ensuing decades, Penn Charter bought adjacent land, and by the 1970s owned almost 40 acres—enough to make room for the Twelfth Street Meetinghouse, which was in need of a new home. In 1956, two downtown meetings, the Philadelphia Monthly Meeting for the Western District, popularly known as the Twelfth Street Meeting, and the Philadelphia Meeting of Friends, called Race Street Meeting, merged to become the Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting. In her book In the Shadow of William Penn, Margaret Hope Bacon gives a concise history of Central Philadelphia Meeting and she chronicles how, for nearly a decade and a half, the newly created meeting was challenged by complicated talks about how to deal with redundant property, including Twelfth Street and, on Race Street just above Fifteenth Street, the meeting house that survived and is still used today. In September 1969, Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting entered into an agreement to sell the Twelfth Street Meetinghouse and land for $810,000 to the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society (PSFS) with the option of being able to move the building. PSFS had long since bought and razed (in 1929) the five-floor William Penn Charter School building, which resided on the southwest corner of Market and Twelfth Streets, and replaced it with a towering skyscraper. For nearly four decades, PSFS had been eyeing the Meetinghouse property, just to the south, as a site for further expansion.
Perhaps driven by negative publicity over the pending destruction of a structure with significant ties to Philadelphia and Quaker history, PSFS delayed razing the Meetinghouse and instead left it in the care of the seller, Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting, which spent many meetings trying to find a proper home for the building. Penn Charter was interested, but so were many other organizations, including the Philadelphia Community College and a local synagogue. Some members of the Meeting objected to selling and moving the building at all. Others pondered the best use of the money once a deal was finalized. According to Bacon, the Meeting proceeded with the sale of the building to PSFS on October 10, 1971, with this justification noted in the minutes: “Since we are an urban meeting our main thrust should be toward the urban crisis and urban development.” During the 1960s, the problems associated with urban decay, inner-city poverty, and racism prompted many urban churches and community organizations to rethink how best to use resources and influence public policy.
Roger Hillas OPC ’45, currently a senior Overseer and then treasurer of the Penn Charter’s governing board, clearly recalls discussions four decades ago about moving the Twelfth Street Meetinghouse. “We were interested,” said Hillas, “but it was going to cost a fortune.”
Hillas’s recollection is supported by school records. Among the dozens of leather volumes on the bookcases in the office of Head of School Darryl J. Ford are four Minute Book binders (earlier volumes are stored in the school archive) recording the minutes of the “Overseers of the Public School Founded by Charter in the Town and County of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania.” Minutes for Dec. 15, 1970, signed by Clerk Barbara S. Sprogell, read: “Expression has been made by several Friends of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting that since the ground under the 12th Street Meetinghouse has been sold and the Centers Committee has no interest in moving the 12th Street Meetinghouse to 15th and Race Streets that one solution might be to give the meetinghouse to Penn Charter in Germantown. Overseers expressed their great willingness to have this Meetinghouse on their property if arrangements could be made to have it moved with funds not belonging to the School.”
Then, almost a year later, this entry for the meeting of Nov. 23, 1971: “Overseers again talked of the possible acquisition of the 12th Street Meeting House for Penn Charter, and arrived at the decision that while desiring it, they thought it unwise as well as impossible to consider spending four to five hundred thousand dollars on moving it to the School grounds. Nor was it deemed the best use of the school’s money to spend upwards of fifty thousand dollars to salvage the beams and woodwork of the Meeting House for their possible later use in a new Meeting House for the School.”
Forty years later, Hough said that it cost $60,000 to deconstruct the meeting house and transport it to George School and, although he did not have a cost on the reconstruction of the building, the figure of $400,000 to $500,000 “did not surprise me.”
The Minute Book not only confirms Hillas’s recollection, it puts his comment in perspective. Penn Charter’s entire budget for 1970-71 was $1,091,945 and the half-million dollar cost of the meeting house project was almost equal to the sum Penn Charter spent that year on teacher salaries: $523,500. (In 1970, teacher salaries ranged from $7,000 to $12,500.) The Minute Book also shows the school engaged in long-range planning for building projects, including renovations to the Main Building and, attached to the kindergarten building, construction of a new Lower School with classrooms for grades 1 through 5.
With the withdrawal of Penn Charter, the problem of what to do with the Meetinghouse still remained. But not for long. In December 1971, Eric Curtis, then head of George School, announced that an anonymous donor—later identified as the Spruance and Alden families— offered to pay to reconstruct the building on its campus if the Meeting paid to dismantle and transport the building. It appeared to be a win-win situation.
The Twelfth Street Meetinghouse, completed in September 1974, continues to throw beautiful shadows on the lives of those who assemble under its giant trusses in Bucks County. For those in the Penn Charter community who wish th
e historic building was on our current campus, the solace in this story may be the understanding that the building went not to a better home, but to an equally suitable one.
Mark Franek is the former dean of students at the William Penn Charter School. He is currently the academic dean at the Rock School for Dance Education.
