Friends have been living in the Cropwell area since 1701, with the meeting being formed in the 1780s.
The first Friend to settle the headwaters of Cropwell Creek in Evesham Township was Thomas Evans, who bought a tract of 1,000 acres. In 1701 he signed a deed with Lenape leader King Himolin for permission to settle land along the old Manahawkin Trail from Cooper’s Point to Barnegat Bay (roughly corresponding to today’s Old Marlton Pike). More Quaker farming families moved to the area in the decades that followed.
An “indulged meeting for worship” was established at Cropwell in 1787, around the same time that work began on establishing a Friends school. Our stand-alone meetinghouse was completed 1809. The discovery of marl, a green clay that was mined as fertilizer, led to the surrounding town becoming known as Marlton.
Some of the original Quaker families in Evesham Township held enslaved Africans in bondage. Quaker opposition to slavery grew in the 1750s, and in 1754, local Friend Joshua Evans experienced a religious conversion. He became an active abolitionist minister, war tax resister, and vegetarian, and traveled with John Woolman on trips to the Southern British colonies to labor with fellow White Quakers into freeing their slaves. In the nineteenth century, Friends helped establish free Black communities in the township. There was an especially close, multi-generational friendship between the Truitt and Evans families, which was explored in a 2022 episode of Roots Less Traveled TV show, much of which was filmed at Cropwell Meeting. You can learn more at Black history in Marlton, a 2023 talk at the meetinghouse.
In September 2021, Cropwell held an open house and began work on attracting new Friends, as reported in a local news report, “Cropwell Friends Meeting in Evesham seeks new members.”
Recent News and Events
- ReClaming the Bay
Rick Bushnell of ReClam the Bay gave a presentation on his environmental group’s activities to a small group at … - John Woolman visits Cropwell
“John Woolman” visited Cropwell Meeting this week. - Cropwell hosts Quarterly Meeting
Two dozen Friends gathered at the meeting to conduct regional Quaker business.
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Historical Resources
- A 1959 history of the meeting, Cropwell Friends Meeting House, has been digitized as part of the West Jersey History Project.
- Cropwell Meeting at 200, a speech given by local historian Joe Laufer at the 200th anniversary celebration of the meetinghouse’s construction in 2009.
- The National Park Service has produced a document, Historic Resources of Evesham Township, NJ, which includes much of the early Quaker history of the region.
- The Find a Grave website has 300 records for the Cropwell burial ground.
- Cropwell has entries in the Historical Marker Database and Wikipedia.
- Our historical records are located in the libraries of Haverford and Swarthmore Colleges, which have a number of old photographs of the building.
- The family of eighteenth-century abolition Joshua Evans started Cropwell Meeting. Evans has a Wikipedia page and some writings on a war tax resistance bio; his journals are archived at Swarthmore College.