Friends Meetinghouse (Uxbridge, Massachusetts)
church building in Massachusetts, United States of America
The Friends Meetinghouse is an historic Friends meeting house of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) located at the junction of Routes 146A (Quaker Highway) and 98 (Aldrich Street) in Uxbridge, Massachusetts. On January 24, 1974, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
History
The Friends Meeting House is one of the last crude brick church structures remaining in America. This building is on the National Registry of Historic Buildings. The Friends Meeting House was built in Uxbridge, Massachusetts in 1770, by Quakers from the Quaker Community in Smithfield, Rhode Island. It was built on the farm of Moses Farnum, circa 1769, from bricks made from a brickyard across the street. The structure is two stories and has a balcony. In the Quaker tradition there were separate entrances and meeting places for men and women. The "Quaker City" settlement is one of the earliest resettlements of Quakers into the Massachusetts Colony following their expulsion by the Puritans in the 17th century.
Friends Meeting house is a brick, two-story house with a rectangular gabled roof at 479 Quaker Hwy.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Friends Meetinghouse (Uxbridge, Massachusetts)” is church building in Massachusetts, United States of America. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Friends, Meetinghouse and Uxbridge, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “church building in Massachusetts, United States of America” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5504192. Authority coordinates are 42.039, -71.621. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1974, 1770 and 1769.
Architectural summaries often privilege surviving fabric and can understate demolished phases, contested use or displaced communities. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Treat names, boundaries and functions as historically changeable. Maps, plans, inventories and administrative records can clarify what the place meant at different dates.
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Contemporary maps, plans, listed-building records, estate papers and the responsible local or national archive.
Three-step research path
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- Expand the search: follow Friends Meetinghouse (Uxbridge, Massachusetts) primary sources, Friends Meetinghouse (Uxbridge, Massachusetts) archive and Friends research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Friends Meetinghouse (Uxbridge, Massachusetts)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.