The Richard Wall House

THE RICHARD WALL HOUSE109 THE RICHARD WALL HOUSE By Horace Mather Lippincott x The Society of Friends was born in a day of intense religious controversy which was so absorbing as to control the political and, indeed, the whole conduct of the nation. It was well-nigh impossible to separate religious from political prejudices. To private arguments were added public debates and to heavy treatises was joined a vigorous pamphleteering. So the seventeenth century was a period of theological discussion and of bitter controversy. Many Protestant sects had arisen and were battling against Catholicism and the English Church, and among each other. About 1650 George Fox emerged from this confusion in England to preach the faith that became known as Quakerism. Gloucestershire came in time to be a strong Quaker center, built up largely through the powerful preaching of Christopher Holder, Josiah Coale, and Thomas Thurston. All of these preachers visited America, establishing Quakerism in Virginia and the Carolinas. The parent monthly meeting in England was sometimes held at Stoke Orchard, about ten miles northwest of the town of Cheltenham, and sometimes at the house of Richard Wall of Hasfield, about fifteen miles northwest of Cheltenham. The town of Cheltenham stands on the edge of the Vale of the Severn, which runs down the west central part of England. It is a charming, rural, garden country of villages and farms watered by the Avon, the Wye, and the Severn, and flanked by the Cotteswold hills. Near by is the source of the Thames. Cheltenham has pleasant, tree-lined streets, and is a health and educational center today, with its springs and its colleges for both sexes. The Shakespeare country, and famous cathedrals and abbeys, are close by. 1An address (slightly abridged) delivered at the unveiling of a tablet at the Richard Wall House, Church and Old York Roads, Cheltenham Township, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, at the commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the founding of Abington Monthly Meeting of Friends, September 23, 1933. The author is a direct descendant, of the ninth generation, of Richard Wall. 110 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS* HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION The ground upon which we stand was granted by William Penn to Richard Wall in 1682, and comprised 600 acres. His son, Richard Wall, Jr., had an adjacent tract of 100 acres. The Walls came over in that year with their friend and neighbor, Toby Leech, who became a provincial assemblyman and a large landowner. His house was about a mile distant on Church Road. These two prominent Friends undoubtedly gave the name of their home district in England to this township. In the minutes of the Philadelphia Monthly Meeting of Friends there appears this record of Richard Wall's arrival : Richard Wall, his certificate was read in the Monthly Meeting of Philadelphia and accepted, which was given him by the Monthly Meeting held at ye house of Edward Edwards of Stock [Stoke] Orchard in ye county of Gloucester the 26th Day of the 4th Month 1682, and subscribed by Charles Toney, Giles King, Edwd. Waters, Joseph Underhill and several others. Arriving in midsummer, 1682, he undoubtedly constructed his residence before the winter set in. Whether this was of logs or of stone, we do not know; but as there was stone immediately available, it is probable that he built a two-story stone house of two rooms without a cellar, which forms the northwest corner of the present house.2 An addition was built about 1725, and a still larger portion of the house was built about 1800. Richard Wall's family consisted of himself and his wife, who was Joane Wheel, and Richard Wall, Jr., and his wife, who was Rachel Leech, a sister of Toby, and their daughter Sarah. Philadelphia Quarterly Meeting set up a monthly meeting for Friends of "Tookany and Poetquesink," now Frankford and Byberry, in Sixth Month 1683, to which these Friends of Cheltenham were attached. This meeting was first held Seventh Month (September) 3, 1683. Traveling through the wilderness on horseback overland was none too easy, and Cheltenham Friends soon desired a more convenient place for worship. Accordingly— At a Mo-Meeting held at Sarah Searys, ye 3d of 10 mo. 1683...