Amawalk Friends Meeting House is located on Quaker Church Road in Yorktown Heights, New York, United States. It is a timber frame structure built in the 1830s. In 1989 it and its adjoining cemetery were listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Quakers had been active in north central Westchester County since the mid-18th century. The current meeting house was the third they built; fire destroyed both predecessors. Not only is it one of the most well-preserved and intact in the county, it is a rare surviving meeting house built by a Hicksite meeting during that schism in American Quakerism.
Architecturally the meeting house shows some signs of Greek Revival influence, also unusual for Quaker buildings. The addition of a porch later in the 19th century also brought in some Victorian touches, again unusual. Its interior was renovated and the building resided when meetings were revived after a brief period of dormancy. However, many of its original furnishings remain.
Taking up most of the property is the meeting's cemetery, which contains many graves of its members from the earlier years, along with that of Robert Capa, the accomplished mid-century war photographer, and his brother Cornell, although neither were members of the meeting, much less Quakers. The headstones of those graves strongly reflect Quaker burial practices, and thus the cemetery is included in the listing as a contributing resource. An architecturally sympathetic First Day School building added when meetings resumed in the 1970s is non-contributing due to its newness.
Buildings and grounds
The lot on which the meeting house, First Day school and cemetery are located is on the west side of Quaker Church Road, also at that point the boundary between the towns of Yorktown and Somers to its east. It is located north of Quaker Church's southern end at Saw Mill River Road (also U.S. Route 202, New York State Route 35 and New York State Route 118). This area was formerly the hamlet of Amawalk, which still lends its name not just to the meeting house but to the Amawalk Reservoir, part of the New York City water supply system, a half-mile (800 m) to the east.
Topographically the area consists of small low hills with occasional narrow depressions, often filled by creeks or wetlands, in between. The meeting house property slopes upward to the west, draining into the valley of an unnamed tributary of Hallocks Mill Brook, a tributary of the Muscoot River, which drains Amawalk Reservoir on its way to Muscoot Reservoir. Its neighborhood is residential, with most houses on large mostly wooded lots.
Across Quaker Church are two houses on such lots. Behind them is a cleared power line right-of-way closely paralleled by the North County Trailway rail trail. To the meeting house's west is Amawalk Hill Cemetery, with another cemetery, Carpenter Hill, to the north, buffered by a woodlot.
Meeting house
A short gravel driveway gives access to the property from the road, passing under the century-old oak and maple trees that shade and screen most of the lot. The meeting house is on the north of the parking area at its end. It is a two-and-a-half-story rectangular wood frame building measuring , with one bay per 10 feet (3 m) of space on the facades. Wooden shingles make up most of the siding of the main block, with a small section of clapboard below the roofline. At its base is a fieldstone foundation; a single brick chimney pierces the center of the slate-shingled gable roof. A hip roofed porch runs the length of the first story's south (front) facade at ground level; on the west end is a small shed-roofed clapboard-sided one-story one-bay addition.
Two separate entrances with paneled wooden double doors are located just inside the outermost windows of the ground floor underneath the porch. The windows themselves are six-over-six double-hung sash windows in plain wooden surrounds with paneled wooden shutters echoing the doors. On the east facade's first story are similarly treated six-over-six double-hung windows. The western addition has a single similar window but without shutters, as does the northern facade.
The porch has a low concrete deck. In its middle are three plain wooden benches with curved backs arranged in a square pattern, facing outward. At its west end a single paneled wooden door leads into the shed-roofed addition. The roof is supported by seven square wooden pillars with curved brackets at the top. It has a molded cornice.
On the second story all windows are two-over-two double-hung sash, set in plain wooden surrounds without shutters. A smaller two-over-two is set in the apex of both gables at the attic level. On the south, scrolled brackets against the clapboard section support a molded cornice similar to that on the porch.
Interior
Both entrances open into the main meeting room, with cushioned wooden benches similar to those on the porch arranged facing the center. Some, meant for the meeting's, are fixed in place; The elders' benches, fixed in place, are arranged in three ascending steps; the other benches are not and can be reconfigured as necessary. Two small collapsible tables for the recording of minutes are located at either end of the first elders' bench. In the middle of the benches are two small wood-burning stoves, one of which dates to the late 19th century. The building otherwise has no heating, plumbing or electricity.
The room is floored in linoleum. On the plain plaster walls traces of the wall that partitioned the meeting room into separate sections for men and women are still visible. The frame of a door that once breached that wall is also present, on the south side. A door in the west wall leads to the addition, which serves as a cloakroom and privy. Inside, the meeting house's hand-hewn pegged structural beams are exposed.
Several wooden pillars, some with original kerosene lamps attached, hold up the wooden gallery, reached by stairs in the southern corners. It is 8 feet () above the ground floor, deep on the southern side and on the east and west sides. The former has loose benches while the latter sections have fixed ones. A ladder on the east side climbs to the full-length attic. There, as in the cloakroom, the building's structural beams are exposed.
First Day School and cemetery
On the south side of the parking lot is the First Day School building. It is a smaller timber frame gable-roofed structure with the same siding and color treatment as the meeting house. Since it was built on the site of the meeting's stable in the 1970s, it is considered a non-contributing resource to the property's historic character.
Conversely, the cemetery, rising up the hillside to the west, is considered a contributing site. Its graves, some of which are thickly overgrown, date from the late 18th century when the meeting was established to the present. The oldest with an identifiable name on its marker is that of Eugent Weeks, who died in 1805. Early markers are of sandstone, giving way to marble for later burials.
Many of the headstones reflect the Quaker virtue of simplicity and are devoid of funerary art, save for some on the southwest corner with a weeping willow design. They simply list the deceased's name, relationship to any others nearby, date of birth and date of death on the side facing away from the meeting house. Some graves have no markers at all.
History
From its emergence in the mid-17th century, the Religious Society of Friends, later known as the Quakers, faced religious persecution in England. As Dissenters, their opposition to maintaining a leadership hierarchy or indeed any clergy at all was considered blasphemous and heretical, and members often met in secret. Many emigrated to the American colonies, where they could be a little more relaxed, but although their numbers grew they did not feel safe being open in their meetings until the mid-18th century.
1760–1797: Establishment of Amawalk Meeting
With the new tolerance came a growth in Quaker meetings. Northern Westchester County was one of the hotbeds of that growth. Quakers established Chappaqua's original center around a 1754 meeting house that remains in use. The Amawalk meeting seems to have gotten its start around 1760. Six years later, the Purchase Monthly Meeting's minutes note that the "Cortlands Manor" meeting had sustained itself for at least a year, and the following year formally extended it for another year.
Growth continued, and the Amawalk meeting requested and received permission to build its first meeting house, on the current site, in 1772. It was completed the following year, and Amawalk was granted Preparative Meeting status in 1774. Five years later, the first meeting house was damaged by fire. Repairs were not done until 1783, and by that time the meeting had already decided to build a new house. The new meeting house was completed and paid for two years later. It was described as being of similar dimensions to the current building, with timber posts and cedar facing.
While the new house was being built, the Amawalk Quakers met in Chappaqua. In 1785 it was merged with that Monthly Meeting for administrative purposes. The meeting began establishing itself in the community—it started educating its children. In 1791 it started a school but had to close it down two years later when it could not find enough qualified teachers. In its stead, the meeting decided in 1796 to support a boarding school being planned by the Nine Partners Meeting outside the village of Millbrook in Dutchess County to the north.
The meeting engaged in social activism as well. In 1783 a member who had bought a slave in order to set him free asked the meeting to consider whether such an act was appropriate; the next month it was decided that it was not. The Amawalk meeting nevertheless followed the strong and growing abolitionist stance of American Quakers; by the next year it reported that none of its members owned slaves.
1798–1839: Growth and schism At the end of the century, in 1798, Amawalk finally received its own status as a Monthly Meeting. With the newer, bigger meeting house, members kept being added. By 1828, Amawalk had had under its care five Preparative Meetings: Peach Pond (discontinued 1811), Salem-Bedford, Peekskill and Croton.
That same year, the meeting had to make a choice between two sides in a schism dividing American Quakers. In response to the growing fervor among evangelical Protestants in the country as a whole that has since come to be known as the Second Great Awakening, many orthodox Quaker meetings adopted practices similar to more mainstream Protestant denominations, adding rituals like hymns and prayers to their services. This was opposed by Elias Hicks, a Long Island Quaker influenced by the freethought movement, who not only reaffirmed the inner light as the traditional Quaker path to the divine but held it superior to the Bible. Many meetings chose one side or the other, and Amawalk's Quakers went with Hicks. The Orthodox members, who at one point had barred the Hicksites from the building, left to build their own meeting house closer to contemporary Yorktown Heights in 1832; it is no longer extant.
Near the end of 1830, the Amawalk meeting house burned. This time the damage was complete. The following year the current meeting house was built. Its construction costs came in slightly over the budgeted $1,250 ($ in modern dollars).