Swarthmore College
Swarthmore, PA 19081
New York Preparative Meeting was established in 1753 by Flushing Monthly Meeting. After the Separation of 1828, the two surviving Orthodox preparative meetings, Northern and Southern Districts, merged in 1828 to form the Preparative Meeting of New York (Orthodox). In 1902 the name was changed to New York Congregational Meeting (also known as 20th Street Congregation); it merged with the Hicksites at 15th Street in 1958.
Records of the New York Congregational Meeting and its predecessor, New York Preparative Meeting (Orthodox), 1828-1957. Collection includes minutes, minutes of the Overseers and the Pastoral Committee, Reception/Visiting Committee, Mission Committee, First Day School (including the Bible-School Assn. of Friends & First Day School Assn.), financial Records and women's minutes of the Eastern District, 1808-1824, and Southern District, 1824-1828. Also includes miscellaneous records of the Friends Lyceum, Friends Freedmen's Association, and Christian Endeavor Society.
Established to give relief to sick poor non-Friends, the New York Female Association first provided aid to sufferers of Yellow Fever. In 1800, following a proposal to open free schools for poor children who lacked other means of obtaining an education, the NYFA opened New York's first public school for female students.
This collection consists primarily of minutes and financial records. In its early years, the Committee met often, concerning itself with the affairs of its public schools. Common entries consist of lists of the numbers of attenders at a particular school and a judgement of the teacher.
This Hicksite Quaker women's charity was organized in 1844 and incorporated in 1856. Its mission was to provide employment in sewing for poor women. The Association rented rooms to which women came to sew. Some women who were unable to leave their homes did sewing at home. In 1849 the Association purchased a house to be used as a store and workroom. The Association was incorporated in 1856, and Lucretia Mott served as president until 1866.
The New York Association of Friends for the Relief of Those Held in Slavery and the Improvement of Free People of Color was an association organized in 1839 by individual Hicksite Quakers to support abolition of slavery and the education of blacks in New York City. The first meeting was held 6/1/1839, in the Rose Street Meeting House and other meetings were held in Friends' homes. Thirty-six members are listed in 1840, including Isaac T. Hopper, James Gibbons and Charles Marriott.
The Association corresponded with a similar group in Green Plain, Clark County, Ohio, and with the Association of Friends held in Philadelphia for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. The Antislavery Standard published accounts of its work.
This collection of material constitutes primarily oversize items too large to be stored with the manuscript collections from which they came. Included are documents, graphics, newspaper advertisements, and cloth items (mostly banners). These items are often important for the peace propaganda they conveyed and/or for the biographical information they contain about peace leaders. It should be noted that the numbering starts over within each sub-category (or type of item), as noted above.
Two of the oldest and most frequently used photograph collections at the SCPC come from the Jane Addams Collection (DG 001) and from the Universal Peace Union Records (DG 038). In the former, only those images that showed Jane Addams, members of her family, or Hull-House were scanned for this project. Additional images reside in the SCPC, including those of Addams' classmates at Rockford Seminary [now College] and Addams' later colleagues in the international peace movement. All images from the UPU Records owned by the SCPC have been scanned and are included in this database.
In 2012, the photographs and lantern slides from the Devere Allen Papers (DG 053) were added, and more from other collections will appear here in the future.
Penn Sewing School was founded in 1868 as the Friends Sewing School. The name was changed in 1871 and classes suspended in 1899. Known first as the “Friends Sewing School,” Penn Sewing School was organized with the help of Dillwyn Parrish and William C. Biddle by two young Quaker women, Annie Caley and Augusta Taber. Friends of Philadelphia Monthly Meeting (Hicksite) held at Fifteenth and Race Streets granted the use of a room, and the children were gathered from the neighborhood. The first four teachers were Augusta Taber, Mary Biddle (later Wood), Sallie Cooper, and Annie Caley (later Dorland).
This collection contains minutes of the Board of Managers of the Pennsylvania Hall Association, 1838-1847, financial and legal papers, and other related materials concerning the financing and opening of the Hall and the events and litigation which followed. The destruction of Pennsylvania Hall marked the extreme of anti-abolition violence in the City of Philadelphia.
In 1847, a committee of Philadelphia Quakers conducted a census of the city’s African American population. Their intent was to document the existence of an “industrious and thriving” portion of that population, and also to discover what sectors of the community may have been in need of attention and assistance. The manuscript volumes they produced contained forty-three elements of information for each of more than four thousand households in Philadelphia. Their survey was distilled into a forty-four-page report titled A Statistical Inquiry into the Condition of the People of Colour of the City and Districts of Philadelphia (1849).
The census volumes have been transcribed, and the raw data is available on GitHub. For more information on the census, as well as visualizations of the occupation data, see the Philadelphia African-American Census 1847 website.
Funding for the digitization of this collection was provided by a 2021-2022 Pennsylvania Abolition Society grant.
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