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Smithfield Friends Meeting House, Parsonage and Cemetery

Woonsocket, Italy

Smithfield Friends Meeting House, Parsonage and Cemetery

The Smithfield Friends Meeting House, Parsonage and Cemetery, is a Friends meeting house of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), rebuilt in 1881. It is located at 108 Smithfield Road (Route 146A) in Woonsocket, Rhode Island (across the street from North Smithfield). The meetinghouse is home t

o one of the oldest Quaker communities in the region. Rhode Island provided a home to many Quaker refugees in the 17th century, and in the early 18th century a group of "Friends" started this congregation. Their original Meeting House, built in 1719, was connected to a chain of Quaker Meeting Houses that were built along Great Road (near Union Village and Smithfield Road Historic District). It was destroyed by fire in 1881 and replaced by the current structure, a simple wood-frame clapboarded structure with Greek Revival features. The forested area directly to the north of the meeting house is a natural cemetery. Roughly 300 Friends from the 18th and 19th centuries are buried in this land, although only 100 Friends requested a gravestone or marker. The area is not treated with pesticide or mowed. A natural canopy of trees is allowed to grow over the cemetery. Quaker customs frowned on the...

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