Wilmington Friends School

Wilmington Friends School. . , The oldest existing school in Delaware, Wilmington Friends was founded in 1748. It resided in the first meeting house of the Wilmington Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) at Fourth and West Streets, which had been built ten years earlier on land given by Elizabeth and William Shipley. The school’s original aim was to provide schooling in matters “civil and useful” for Quaker children and “poor children, either Black or White.”, In its first century, guided by Wilmington Monthly Meeting, the school fulfilled that aim. Delaware’s first historian, Benjamin Ferris, wrote in 1846, “Thousands of children have there received the first rudiments of an English education.” In its second century, as the state provided public education, Friends became Delaware’s first true college preparatory school. , In 1937, having outgrown its much-expanded but aged home, Friends School moved to this site in Alapocas. Though now physically separated from its parent meeting, the school continues to be sustained by the wisdom of that meeting and the teaching of all Quakers that “there is that of God in each of us.”