As the borough of Catawissa in Columbia County celebrates 250 years, the Quaker (Friends) Meeting House has had a significant part in its history. 

There are some questions about when the meeting house was built. Newspaper accounts and records from Quarterly Quaker newsletters indicate the first record of service was in 1787 when permission was granted to William Hughes, William Collins, James Watson, John Love, and other Friends residing in the vicinity to hold services there. The Monthly Meeting at Catawissa was established in 1795, and the first official meeting was on April 23, 1796, of which Isaac Wiggins was the clerk.

Among the collections at Haverford College near Philadelphia, are handwritten notes from T. Chalkley Matlack entitled “Friends Meeting Houses, and the Boarding Homes, Schools, and Burial Grounds associated with them, located in Columbia, Delaware, and Lycoming Counties.”

Matlack includes notes on the early story of the meeting house given by Louisa Jane Roberts in the Friends Intelligencer of November 24, 1886. “During a recent visit to members of Fishing Creek Half Yearly meeting who reside in the vicinity of Roaring Creek and Bear Gap Meetings, I came across the minute book used by Catawissa Monthly Meeting from the date of application of the same, eleventh month, 1795. Prior to this, a meeting was held by the indulgence of Exeter Monthly Meeting. Before 1779, the place was a wilderness. The earliest date to the settlement of Friends (was) in 1787 when the town was laid out, and a beautiful shady knoll selected for the site of the meeting house which was built the same year.”

A story in the February 12, 1937, edition of the Bloomsburg Morning Press reported that after the first official meeting in April of 1796, “The monthly meetings continued for twelve years, but the number of members was reduced by that time, and the meeting formally dissolved on December 24, 1808. From then on services were held in the meeting house at intervals until 1814, after which the old meeting house was closed and for many years abandoned. The property became a sort of dumping ground, and the state of neglect continued through the generation and more, until 1890, when Miss Mary Emma Walter came to Catawissa from Elysburg, determined to make the care of the meeting house her work. For nearly forty years it was her work, her love, and the success that attended her efforts is best attested to by the fact that arrangements were made for the perpetuation of the old structure. 

Miss Walter quickly endeared herself to the community and enlisted the aid of others in improving the appearance of the property. For many years Miss Walter was the sole worshipper in the building although at times during the summer, members of the Millville Meeting came to Catawissa to conduct services.” Miss Walter died in 1930 at the age of 89 and is among those buried in the church cemetery where a stone wall separates it from the house of worship. FindAGrave.com lists over 250 burials at the Friends Cemetery. Among them is Mordecai Pancoast, the grandfather of Abigail Geisinger. She provided the funds for the George F. Geisinger Memorial Hospital in Danville, Pennsylvania.

Catawissa borough purchased the Meeting House property in 1967. The National Register of Historic Places added the one-story log building to its rolls in 1978.

According to the website Quaker.org, “A Quaker meeting is a simple gathering. Because Friends believe that Spirit may reveal itself to anyone, we don’t have priests dispensing grace to a congregation of followers; instead, everyone arrives at the meetinghouse as equals, and seating is usually arranged so everyone faces each other in a square or a circle. Then, in what’s known as an unprogrammed meeting, everyone sits in silence, usually for an hour, and waits to see if a message comes. Anyone could be the instrument through which God (or Spirit, if you prefer) chooses to give a message that day.”

The term unprogrammed meeting is explained in this way, “You may have noticed the term “unprogrammed meeting” above, which implies the existence of programmed meetings. In a programmed meeting, one or more members of the Friends community may serve in a pastoral role by leading everyone in song or prayer or sharing a reading from Scripture. (Programmed meetings tend to take place in intensely Christian Quaker communities, which are often known as “Friends’ Churches,” and are increasingly the norm in Quaker communities outside the United Kingdom and North America.) Such activities, however, only take up a portion of the meeting—room still gets made at every meeting for listening for a divine prompting in the communion of expectant silence.”

Monthly meetings are still held in Pennsylvania. Among them are Millville, Columbia County, Pennsdale in Lycoming County, State College in Centre County, and Wellsboro in Tioga County. A large concentration of meeting houses is found in southeastern Pennsylvania.