Springfield Friends Meeting House and Burial Ground

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The Meetinghouse:

Springfield Friends arrived in 1806-10 in large family and Meeting groups, mostly from North Carolina, with others from Virginia and Pennsylvania, and a few came from New York. The extended Harvey/Hale/Hadley family, of five brothers and two sisters and the widowed mother, settled on the 2,000-acre Survey #2372 purchased from a Virginian, along Todd's Fork. They divided the land among them and sold to other Quaker families. Meeting began in the log schoolhouse that had been built on Isaac Harvey's farm, and became an Indulged Meeting by Center Meeting by 1809.

In 1812 land was donated by Isaac and Lydia Harvey for a burial ground and Meeting House. The site was inside an ancient semicircular mound. The first meetinghouse was of logs and the second of brick in 1819. The 1851 third one was frame, of the traditional design. In 1892 Springfield Friends hired a carpenter and built a chapel style Meeting House, which is still in use, with some modernization.

Inside the cemetery:

In the cemetery, founded in 1812, are the remains of many Quaker pioneer settlers who came to the Ohio wilderness to begin anew, building homes, farms, schools, and Meetings, villages and businesses. In the old burial ground section, some of the graves of early and notable Quakers are marked with signs so that you can enjoy a self-guided tour. This became a cemetery association in 1888, so now there are many graves of other members of the community, in addition to Quakers.

You will also find the Eli Harvey Monument stone. This boulder honors Quaker artist Eli Harvey (1860-1957) who was born in a farmhouse across the river valley from the Meetinghouse. He went to the Meeting school, and then went to Cincinnati to study art, then to Paris in the 1890s. He did his major work in New York City from 1901-1929. The largest collection of the sculptures and paintings of Eli Harvey resides in Wilmington at the Clinton County History Center, another stop on the Byway.