In 1877 the Plainfield Friends Meeting (Society of Friends, or Quakers) split into two groups. A smaller group of conservatives broke away from the larger group and after several years of controversy over meetinghouse and property ownership, a committee was appointed to start collecting funds for a meeting house of their own. In July 1888, this building was completed.
This is a double-pen construction building, which was a type common to Hendricks County throughout the mid to late nineteenth century. Basically a two-room rectangle, the double-pen building was frame in construction with two exterior doors, one for each room. In this instance, the rooms were divided by a partition, rather than a permanent wall; the men held business meetings in one room while the women met in the other. The partition was opened for worship by the whole congregation.
According to a history of the church in the Plainfield Messenger, the first wedding in the building was that of Luna O. Stanley and Elma Maxwell in 1890.
Both the Plainfield and Sugar Grove Conservative Friends monthly meetings were part of the Western Yearly Meeting of Conservative Friends, which was discontinued in 1962. As late as 1963 the Plainfield Conservative Friends continued as an independent meeting, but sometime between 1966 and 1971 the building was converted into a duplex for rental. Since that times it has changed hands several times as a rental property.
