The Colora Meetinghouse is a historic Friends (or Quaker) meeting house located at Colora,

Cecil County Cecil County is a county located in the U.S. state of Maryland at the northeastern corner of the state, bordering both Pennsylvania and Delaware. As of the 2020 United States census, the population was 103,725. The county seat is Elkton. The ...

Maryland Maryland ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. It borders the states of Virginia to its south, West Virginia to its west, Pennsylvania to its north, and Delaware to its east ...

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. The meeting house was built in 1841 as part of a larger dispute known as the "great separation." The original members of the Colora Meeting, then called the Nottingham Preparative Meeting, sided with the orthodox Friends splitting off from the Hicksite West Nottingham Friends Meeting. The new meeting was first part of Baltimore Yearly Meeting. In 1854 it formed the Primitive Yearly Meeting with several nearby meetings and in 1890 became part of the Western Quarterly Meeting.

Architecture

It is six

bays A bay is a recessed, coastal body of water that directly connects to a larger main body of water, such as an ocean, a lake, or another bay. A large bay is usually called a ''gulf'', ''sea'', ''sound'', or ''bight''. A ''cove'' is a small, ci ...

wide and one room deep, and measures 36 feet by 22 feet, in the traditional plan with separate entrances for the men and women and a sliding divider to separate the interior into two areas for business meetings. Its walls are constructed of stuccoed fieldstone, with a wooden box

cornice In architecture, a cornice (from the Italian ''cornice'' meaning "ledge") is generally any horizontal decorative Moulding (decorative), moulding that crowns a building or furniture element—for example, the cornice over a door or window, ar ...

. The building features two interior end chimneys protruding through a

slate Slate is a fine-grained, foliated, homogeneous, metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low-grade, regional metamorphism. It is the finest-grained foliated metamorphic ro ...

roof. The property includes a small cemetery and a two-story building built in 1869, and used as a Friends schoolhouse until 1890 when public schools were built. The Colora Meetinghouse was listed on the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government's official United States National Register of Historic Places listings, list of sites, buildings, structures, Hist ...

in 1977. It is open for worship once yearly, generally at 2:00 pm on the third Sunday of September. File:Colora Meeting House CecilCo MD 1.JPG, Back of the meeting house File:Colora Meeting House CecilCo MD 3.JPG, Oblique view File:Colora Meeting House CecilCo MD interior.JPG, Interior showing the "facing benches" for the elders and the moving divider sometimes used to separate the men's and women's meetings

References

External links

*, including undated photo, at Maryland Historical Trust Quaker meeting houses in Maryland Churches in Cecil County, Maryland Churches on the National Register of Historic Places in Maryland Churches completed in 1841 National Register of Historic Places in Cecil County, Maryland {{CecilCountyMD-NRHP-stub