{"nrhp_refnum":"03001034","name":"Buckingham Friends Meeting House","other_names":["Buckingham Meeting of Friends","Buckingham Monthly Meeting"],"category":"building","location":{"address":"5684 Lower York Road","address_restricted":false,"city":"Buckingham Township","county":"Bucks County","state":"PA","lat":40.34476905750006,"lon":-75.04091164838913,"geom_source":"nps_gis"},"listed_date":"2003-07-31","is_nhl":true,"nhl_designated_date":"2003-07-31","areas_of_significance":["Architecture","European","Religion"],"significance_levels":["national"],"summary":{"what_it_is":"A two-story, gable-roofed stone Friends meeting house in Buckingham Township (Lahaska), Bucks County, Pennsylvania, built in 1768. It has a six-bay front with separate entryways for men and women.","why_significant":"The nomination argues the building is the first Friends meeting house built in the two-celled, or \"doubled,\" plan with a retractable partition, a form that served as a design prototype for nearly a century. It is also tied to the early Quaker settlement of Bucks County under William Penn and to Quaker religious and social life on the site for nearly three centuries.","narrative":"Built of irregularly coursed local stone in 1768, the Buckingham Friends Meeting House stands in Lahaska in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Its two-story, gable-roofed form has six bays across and two entries, one for men and one for women, on the south front. Inside, a single room is divided by a wood-paneled retractable partition into two nearly equal meeting rooms, each with its own tiered facing benches, fixed benches and stove allowance. The date stone reads 1768, and the roof is slate with two brick chimneys. The building is regarded as the first Friends meeting house to use this doubled plan, which became a model for American Quaker meeting houses for nearly a century. Its design also reflects the Quaker Discipline movement of the mid-eighteenth century. The site has held Buckingham Friends' worship, social and educational activities for nearly three hundred years, and it succeeded three earlier meeting houses on the same ground.","period_of_significance":"1768","architect_builder":"Mathias Hutchinson (builder, as named in the form's architect/builder field)","architectural_style":"Plain Style Friends meeting house with Georgian detailing","criteria":["A","C"],"status_note":null,"vacant_flag":null,"machine_generated":true,"model":"claude-haiku-5-5","prompt_version":"v1.1-2026-10-29","generated_at":"2026-10-29 17:11:30.939291-05","source_pdf":"https://s3.amazonaws.com/NARAprodstorage/lz/electronic-records/rg-079/NPS_PA/03001034_NHL.pdf"},"photo":null,"district":null,"sources":{"nps_snapshot_date":"2026-05-22","nara_catalog":"https://catalog.archives.gov/id/71994157","wikipedia":null,"wikidata":null},"indexable":true,"url":"https://nationalhistoricalregister.com/pennsylvania/bucks-county/buckingham-friends-meeting-house-03001034/"}