Quaker Meeting House

This three-story brick building was erected in Mount Pleasant in 1814 and was the first yearly Quaker meeting house west of the Alleghenies. Capable of holding 2,000 persons, the building contains an auditorium with a balcony. The auditorium can be divided into two rooms by lowering a wooden partition; when the building was actively used by Quakers, men and women met separately. Jesse Thomas and Robert Carothers laid out Mount Pleasant in 1803. It soon became an important market for Quaker settlers. The Mount Pleasant meeting house was used regularly until 1909. The Society of Friends, more commonly known as the Quakers, came to Ohio in the late 1700s and the early 1800s. The first Quaker to arrive in Ohio was George Harlan in 1795. By 1800, approximately eight hundred Quaker families were living in Ohio. The number of families had more than doubled by 1814. The Friends originally settled in eastern and southern Ohio and established Mt. Pleasant, Alliance, Salem, Lisbon, and several other communities in the state. The Ohio Quakers' yearly meeting took place in Mt. Pleasant. There, the Friends built a meeting house that could hold approximately two thousand people. The Quakers played a major role in nineteenth-century reform efforts including the temperance, women's rights, and abolition movements.