The Alloways Creek Friends Meetinghouse, constructed in 1756 with a major addition in 1784, is an asymmetrical, six-bay, two-story, brick Quaker meetinghouse. The exterior is characterized by the use of Flemish bond on the south and east elevations, double-leaf entrance doors under gabled porch roofs on the south and gable-end elevations, and twelve-over-twelve, eight-over-eight, and six-over-six sash windows with paneled shutters. The interior is divided into two rooms, each two stories in height with a gallery, by a wood and plaster partition wall with movable wood panels. At the north end of each room, platforms support the facing benches. The sloping gallery, which runs along the west, south, and east exterior walls, has four levels. A one-story brick privy addition with a shed roof abuts the north elevation. The meetinghouse is located on a roughly rectangular, nearly flat, half-acre of land bounded by vacant land to the east and north and by late-nineteenth and late-twentieth century residences to the west and south. The building faces south toward Buttonwood Avenue near the southern boundary of the property. Eight mature Buttonwood trees (Platamis Occidentalis) are arranged across the front of the building and around the west and north sides of the building. Two "memorial walks" composed of old gravestones and carved memorial stones line up from the street to the two entrances on the south elevation…
The Alloways Creek Friends Meetinghouse, constructed in 1756, was the third meetinghouse constructed for the Alloways Creek Meeting. The original form of this meetinghouse, a one-story, single-cell building, was a common form for small Friends Meetings in the Delaware Valley from the late seventeenth through the mid-eighteenth centuries. The construction of the major addition in 1784, along with alterations to the original building, converted the meetinghouse into the two-story, two-cell form that was quickly coming to dominate Quaker meetinghouse design in the second half of the eighteenth century. While new meetinghouses constructed during the period were built with equal-sized rooms, reflecting contemporary thought on space arrangement for worship and business meetings, the Alloways Creek Friends Meetinghouse retained a slight discrepancy in the size between the two rooms, maintaining the distinction between the main worship room/men's business meeting room and the women's business meeting room found in the earlier generation of meetinghouses. In the older meetinghouses, the women's business meeting room was smaller than the main worship room/men's business meeting room was conducted since the women's room was never intended to house all of the members of the Meeting at one time. Although Friends meetinghouses are deliberately devoid of the ecclesiastical accoutrement found in other houses of worship, they share some common features with each other. Typical Quaker meetinghouse elements exhibited by the Alloways Creek Friends Meetinghouse include its plain, rectangular brick form with a side gable roof, the three-bay/six-bay facade configuration, the clear-glass sash windows (such as one might find in a house) in lieu of stained glass, the covered entrances, the unadorned interior, the movable partition that allowed joint worship services and separate business meetings, the facing bench platforms, and the U-shaped gallery. The meetinghouse is significant in the area of Architecture ... as a representative example of the architectural evolution of the eighteenth-century Quaker meetinghouse in the Delaware Valley.
The meeting house appears to be in good condition and continues to be used as a Friends Meetinghouse and is used at least once per year.