Meeting for Worship by Adrian Martinez.
In 1798, an act of state legislature established the Chester County Poorhouse, a working farm near Embreeville that was the first system of relief of its kind in Pennsylvania. Many of its concepts, such as allowing the poor to learn a trade and to run a productive business such as the poorhouse limestone quarries, rested on the Quaker ideas of equality and stewardship. The poorhouse was not a Quaker institution, but a county-run operation that became part orphanage and homeless shelter, part hospital and nursing home, part asylum and battered women’s refuge. For the poor, it meant survival. For taxpayers, it meant that the county’s poor became everyone’s responsibility.
The Quakers of West Bradford established a pattern of caring for the least capable among their community. Starting in the late 1760s, the township tax rolls included names such as “Poor Tom” and “Blind Betty” who lived with local families as part of a support system called “indoor relief.”
Chester County poorhouse. Image courtesy of the Chester County Historical Society
Bradford Meeting is an active Quaker meeting and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Photograph courtesy of Fred Weyman.