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Pennsylvania Dutch Guide-Book
Pennsylvania Dutch Tourist Bureau
Lancaster County (Pa.) -- Guidebooks; Pennsylvania Dutch
Fifty-four clergymen are named as having supplied the local Methodist
churches of Lancaster County up to the year 1802 when the Soudersburg
church was erected. Boehm’s Church, still standing in Pequea township,
was a pioneer Methodist institution. Henry Boehm had a great deal to do
with the founding of the First Methodist Episcopal Church of Lancaster
in 1807. The church building was erected in 1809 at the corner of Walnut
and Christian streets. In 1840 ground was acquired extending the church
lot to Duke street, where a handsome church structure now stands.
[Illustration: ST. JAMES EPISCOPAL]
St. Paul’s Methodist Church dates from 1849; Broad Street from 1867;
Bethel African Methodist Church from 1821. Many Methodist churches are
found in southern Lancaster County and in the Octoraro Valley, and in
all the Boroughs.
The Church of the United Brethren was the outcome of a meeting held in
the Isaac Long barn near Oregon, Lancaster County, in the middle of the
18th century, when leaders of four denominations decided to be Brethren.
It was not, however, until 1800 that the new denomination was separately
organized. The oldest United Brethren congregation in Lancaster County
is Ranck’s in the New Holland Circuit. The congregation met for forty
years in a private house until a church was built in 1844.
There are many United Brethren churches in rural Lancaster County. The
Otterbein U. B. Church in Lancaster City began in 1902 as a Mission
Sunday School and has grown into one of the most vigorous churches in
the city.
It is impossible in this space to do more than mention some of the other
denominations, some of which are comparatively strong in Lancaster
County. There are the United Evangelical churches, the Winebrennerians,
or Church of God, members who have been active in the county for more
than a century; the German Baptists and the English Baptists; the Church
of Christ; the Swedenborgians and the Evangelical Association.
The Quakers crossed the Atlantic with Wm. Penn, and soon found their way
into what is now Lancaster County. John Kennerly settled near Christiana
in 1691. The first Friends meeting house was erected by Sadsbury Quakers
in 1725. The Bart meeting house, erected 100 years later, represented
the views of the Hicksite Friends. In 1758 the Penn Hill meeting house
was built. The Quaker meeting house at Bird-in-Hand dates from 1749, the
same year in which the Lampeter meeting house was built.
The Church of Our Father (Unitarian) was a rather late arriver in
Lancaster. It was organized in 1902, and the stone church on West
Chestnut Street was dedicated in 1909. The lecture hall in connection
with the church was named Emerson Hall.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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