Woodlawn Quaker Meetinghouse (Historical Marker)

Here follows the inscription written on this roadside historical marker:

Woodlawn Quaker Meetinghouse:
The Woodlawn Quaker Meetinghouse was built from 1851 – 1853 by members of The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) who in 1846 purchased the 2,000 acre Woodlawn tract as the means to “establish a free-labor colony in a slave state” (Journal of Chalkley Gillingham founding member of Woodlawn Quaker Settlement).

They left homes in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York, where nearby Underground Railroad routes made clear the human cost of slavery and its violation of Friends’ principles of equality and non-violence.

Seeking to uphold Quaker belief there is “that of God” in everyone, the settlement’s spiritual leaders envisioned a community of small farms operating without slave labor as an alternative to Virginia’s plantation culture.

The Quakers’ agricultural practices and employment of free labor succeeded. Their farms, mills, schools, and this meetinghouse established a thriving community, shared with free black landowners and like-minded Abolitionists such as the Woodlawn Baptists.

Throughout the Civil War, Friends continued to worship in this meeting house, even when Union Troops occupied it.

The community remained into the 20th century, guided by Friends’ principles of peace and community service. However, with World War I, the United States Army began to absorb Woodlawn’s farmland, eventually creating Fort Belvoir. This “Quaker Plain Style” meetinghouse today continues as an active place of worship, home of the Alexandria Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends.

Photo caption:
This 1878 G.M. Hopkins map shows a populated 19th-century Woodlawn community with the Woodlawn Quaker Meetinghouse, Woodlawn Baptist Church and Woodlawn Mansion at its center.


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Here follows an excerpt from the 1970 Fairfax County Master Inventory of Historic Sites which contained entries from the Historic American Buildings Survey Inventory:

The Woodlawn Friends Meeting House stands on land which once belonged to George Washington. It was part of the Dogue Run Farm of the Mount Vernon Estate and was included in the land he willed to his ward Nelly Custis Lewis and her husband Lawrence Lewis, which they called Woodlawn Plantation. In 1848 the Lewis estate sold the plantation to the firm of Troth and Gillingham, a group of Quakers who planned to divide the land into small farms and work them with free labor. Troth and Gillingham divided the land between them, and in about 1850 Chalkley Gillingham agreed to give a piece of land to the Society of Friends for use as a meeting place. A formal deed to this effect was recorded in 1857.

The meeting house was constructed in about 1853 and, according to Dorothy Troth Muir in Potomac Interlude, "before long the building had to almost double its original size." The building is a simple, one-story structure, virtually without decoration except for the elaborate shutter stops. Separate entrances for men and women are still maintained. A one-story porch encloses the structure on three sides.

To the rear of the structure is a small cemetery where many early Quaker settlers of the area, including Troths and Gillinghams, are buried.

During the Civil War the monthly meetings were occasionally cancelled by the presence of troops blocking the roads, and the meeting house itself was often used by Northern troops. In the twentieth century the nearby Camp Humphreys (now Fort Belvoir) continued to expand and began to encroach upon the meeting house. The property abuts a state road on one side. Since World War II, Fort Belvoir has occupied the surrounding area.