FUN FACTS
About 1912 some Pennsylvania State College students from Quaker families began meeting and worshipping in the home of Hanna and Charles Maule, new residents formerly from Sadsbury Friends Meeting.
By 1925 those students and a handful of adult Friends held their first official meeting for business and became a monthly meeting. The meeting was a “United” meeting, neither Orthodox nor Hicksite, and was associated with both the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting and the Baltimore Yearly Meeting.
For the next quarter century all the clerks of the meeting were students, with a slowly growing number of non-students becoming important in the life of the meeting, which by then had about seventy members.
Impressively, with the assistance of Friends from three Quarterly Meetings, within two years (1927) the meeting had constructed a meetinghouse at 318 South Atherton Street.
The benches for the meetinghouse were donated by the Halfmoon and Bald Eagle/Unionville Friends, since their meetings were no longer active.
As the meeting continued to grow, Friends began considering the need for a larger meetinghouse, and after years of challenges they moved into their present meetinghouse on Prospect Avenue in 1980. It was constructed by Ralph Way, whose family had become SCFM members in the 1930s when the Halfmoon meeting became inactive.
State College Friends were actively involved in many social concerns from its beginning. Those included providing conscientious objection counselling for students, advocacy for African-Americans in the community, prison visitation and advocacy, environmental concerns and many others.
As an already thriving monthly meeting, State College Friends Meeting received a huge injection of additional experienced Quaker members at the time of the opening of Foxdale Village Quaker-Directed Continuing Care Community in 1990. The meeting-room was full to capacity at the time of worship, and the meeting sought ways of being able to get to know one another better in such a large community.
Like all the world, COVID 19 caused Friends to need to find new ways to retain community, with Zoom becoming one valuable tool.
By 2025 the meeting had gradually grown back into an active spiritual community, and was able to joyfully celebrate the centennial of its first meeting for business in 1925.
To read more about State College Friends Meeting (Chapter Eight) click on this link to D. Douglas Miller: Quakers in Centre County, Pennsylvania.