Mennonite Meetinghouse

The Germantown Mennonite Church is a stone meeting house in Philadelphia, built in 1770 to replace an original log meeting house erected on the same site in 1708. The building is simple in form, with a gabled roof of shingles supported by timber trusses, a central entrance in the gable end facing the street, and plastered walls and ceiling. Its interior has six double-hung windows, wooden benches on either side of a center aisle, and a communion table with turned legs. An addition was made in 1908, and the interior was restored to its colonial simplicity in 1952. The congregation's history begins with Mennonite settlers who arrived in the area in 1683, and the first Mennonite meeting house in America was erected here in 1708. Christopher Dock taught in the congregation's school, and William Rittenhouse, the first ordained Mennonite minister, built the first papermill in the colonies. The communion table is said to have been used for signing the Germantown Protest of 1688 against slavery, regarded as the first such effort by any group in British America. The congregation remained small, yet it was the parent congregation of Mennonites in America.