The University of Lynchburg, Quaker Memorial Presbyterian Church and the Lynchburg Museum System came together Saturday to recognize a key figure and landmark in the city’s history.
While a block party to celebrate Lynchburg founder John Lynch’s birthday was in full swing on the grounds of Quaker Memorial Presbyterian Church — with live music, food trucks, games and pony rides — officials from the three groups were signing a partnership agreement in the South River Meeting House, a late-18th century Quaker gathering place adjacent to the main sanctuary.
Church member and former University of Lynchburg employee Carolyn Eubank chaired the 1983 commission to restore the meeting house and has led the effort to expand its programming, which she thinks the partnership will encourage. Eubank already has seen the collaboration yield good things: the museum system has been giving tours of the site and the University of Lynchburg will have an intern working on video programming soon.
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The simple stone building’s history starts with Sarah Lynch, John Lynch’s mother, who started holding Quaker meetings in her home in 1754, according to a University of Lynchburg news release. Eubank said the area’s Quaker community outgrew Sarah Lynch’s House and built a log meeting house on the site of the current structure.
This building was destroyed in a fire in 1768 and replaced by a frame building which the Quakers again outgrew. John Lynch donated the 10 acres used to build the stone meeting house, completed in 1798. Eight of the city’s 11 original trustees worshiped there and according to Eubank the members of the meeting hall were the first in the south to free their slaves.
Quakers were “far ahead of their time,” Eubank said, championing gender equality, abolition and prison and mental health reform.
“You name a social justice movement, they were there,” Eubank said.
The meeting house fell into disrepair in the 1820s after area Quakers who opposed slavery and war fled the city. Eubank said a tree grew up through the middle and there were probably only three walls standing.
Presbyterians purchased the property in 1899 and rebuilt the structure as Quaker Memorial Presbyterian Church. The stone walls are original — the arched roof is a Presbyterian addition. After building a larger adjacent facility, the church made the meeting house a historic shrine, and it’s now a Virginia Historic Landmark listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
A restoration and preservation of the South River Meeting House was completed in 1983 to return the building to what it would have looked like when John Lynch was a congregant.
The partnership between the University, Church and Museum System is part of an effort to expand the historic sites’ offerings.
Quaker Memorial’s pastor Reverend Anghaarad Teague Dees, Director of the Lynchburg Museum System Ted Delaney and University of Lynchburg Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs Allison Jablonski were seated for the signing ceremony where Quaker elders would have sat — on simple pews facing a crowd that would have been silent worshipers in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Teague Dees called the meeting house a “beautiful jewel” and said the partnership “will allow folks to come and see this important slice of history of the Quakers who helped found our city.”
“We do have representatives from music and art, history, communication studies, theater, and a few other disciplines that are working together on possible projects with the meeting house and with the museum system so that we can come and offer interpretive history with the meeting house for the citizens of Lynchburg,” Jablonski said.
Delaney told the audience the timing for the initiative “could not be better,” because of the city’s growing, younger population who likely don’t know about the meeting house and the city’s Quaker origins, as well as the upcoming 250th anniversary of the founding of the nation in 2026.
“The time is right to take another look at Quakers and to educate new generations, from elementary school all the way up to retiring age, about the origins of our community,” Delaney said.
After the signing, Delaney and Jablonski placed a wreath on John Lynch’s grave in the adjacent historic cemetery. Eubank said the wreath was intentionally simple — much like the peaceful interior meeting space offering no distractions to worship — because that’s what John Lynch would have thought was right.