Read time: 5 min.

The Richsquare Friends Meetinghouse in rural Henry County is a place that time has forgotten. Silent prayers from within the church’s walls and stories of those interred in the graveyard have long become echoes in the quiet of the woods. Setting foot on the property reveals the sounds of whispering leaves, distant birdsong, and… traffic whizzing past at eighty miles an hour?

It would be impossible to stumble across the Richsquare Meetinghouse. It sits at the end of South County Road 250-East, a winding path that almost seems as if it’s been reclaimed by the forest. Nevertheless, I-70’s eastbound lanes pass within a hundred feet of the church’s old cemetery. Nearly thirty-thousand people speed by the old meetinghouse every day without knowing it’s there¹!

I love places hidden in plain sight. Few are more compelling than the Richsquare Friends Meeting- it has a long history! Founded in 1831, the institution got its name from Jeremiah Parker, a Quaker pioneer who suggested it be named after his home meeting in North Carolina. A log building was built to serve the nascent congregation, and Jeremiah’s son Isaac began teaching students there in 1836².

A dedicated frame schoolhouse was built east of the log meetinghouse in 1841, and a new sanctuary was built ten years later. After both buildings were destroyed in a fire, the meeting erected a two-story building, the Richsquare Academy³, which was large enough to accomodate both the church and the school. The academy was known as one of the finest educational institutions in the county! Unfortunately, it closed after officials in Franklin Township built a common school half a mile south in 1865⁴.

The present meetinghouse was erected in 1895. A one-story brick building with a corner tower, the structure features Romanesque Revival elements, at least roughly translated through an austere Quaker lens. The building’s most striking features are its steep gables, brick pilasters and corbels, and tower, which once featured a hipped roof and open wooden belfry⁵.

The interior of the building was influenced by the Akron Plan, a spatial arrangement used in the design of Protestant churches consisting of a fan of wedge-shaped Sunday school classrooms around a central auditorium⁶. A foyer underneath the tower leads to Richsquare’s sanctuary, which features a domed interior and rings of pews built specifically for the congregation by the National Church Company of Richmond. The pulpit stood in the northeastern corner of the room.

Not many know this, but I’m a birthright Quaker. A few years ago, I attended services in a handful of historic meetinghouses with my mom as part of a project to research an 1866 diary written by her great-great-great aunt. Most of the Friends meetings we went to that summer featured a similar layout.

The northern third of the Richsquare building was originally designed to be partitioned off as a women’s sanctuary. Later, it was used for Sunday school. In the 1950s, the congregation added a simple fellowship hall to the rear of the building⁷.

Church service has not been held at Richsquare for a long time. Members met twice a week at the building until 1911. Eighty-nine years later, an aging, dwindling congregation forced the meetinghouse to close its doors for good.

In July, Indiana Landmarks announced that the NRHP-listed property was for sale. Mom’s always hunting for historic properties, and we checked it out on our way home from a trip to Richmond. Unfortunately, we arrived too late: on July 22nd, a sign out front stated that a sale was pending.

That may have been a blessing in disguise. It would be really hard to convert the meetinghouse into a modern home! The building is subject to preservation covenants that restrict exterior modifications, which is great, but the cemetery’s property line extends right up to its eastern wall. That’s not so good.

The Richsquare Cemetery dates to 1832. In 2006, historians nominating the property to the National Register of Historic Places noted 383 marked burials at the cemetery, most commemorated with simple tablets adhering to Quaker tradition. I found a few obelisks near the back, and I saw four markers with dates from after the meetinghouse was shuttered.

The highway’s roar faded as I circled the old meetinghouse and walked through the cemetery. It’s almost as though the place exists outside of time! The realtor’s sign out front indicated otherwise, of course, but the Richsquare Friends Meetinghouse and cemetery still await those who venture down its distant lane into the heart of the woods. I hope the church’s new owner continues to preserve its story for future generations of admirers.

Sources Cited
1 2002 Interstate Annual Average Daily Traffic Volumes (2002). INDOT. Indianapolis. Web. Retrieved October 14, 2023.
2 Hazzard, G. (1906). Hazzard’s History of Henry County Indiana, Volume II. 3 George  Hazzard [New Castle]. Book.
3 Biographical Memoirs of Henry County, Indiana [1902). B. F. Bowen [Logansport]. Book.
4 History of Henry County Indiana (1884). The Inter-State Publishing Company [Chicago]. Book.
5 National Register of Historic Places, Richsquare Friends Meetinghouse and Cemetery, Lewisville, Henry County, Indiana, National Register # 06000305.
6 Evans, H. F. (1915). “Architecture of Sunday Schools” in The Encyclopedia of 6 Sunday Schools and Religious Education. Nelson & Sons [New York]. Book.
7 (See footnote 5).