A Bicentennial History

Of Ebensburg’s

First United Church of Christ

1997

They came – "sturdy Welsh," in the words of one of their advocates – to make their Gwaldfa, their new homeland, out of the lonely Allegheny mountaintops. Weather and odds stood against them. Their numbers were small – about two dozen. They traveled, many of them on foot, for two months, two-thirds of the way across Pennsylvania. They arrived November 19, 1796, in a place native Americans may have found too inhospitable, just as another unforgiving winter gripped the Alleghenies.

"We built a cabin and covered it with spruce boughs," wrote the Rev. Rees Lloyd, the Welsh-born pastor who led his band of pilgrims. "And Providence covered it with snow, two feet deep, where the town of Ebensburg now is."

This settlement, born at what is now the southern edge of Lloyd Cemetery, would struggle and grow, its centerpiece a church that took root during the settlers’ first spring, April 1797. The church, then called the Welsh Independent Church, was housed in a crude log building, probably erected in a day or two by a crew drawn from the congregation. The 24 Charter members planted the seeds for the first Welsh Congregational Church in the nation, the earliest Congregational Church in the state and the oldest surviving church in Cambria County.

"First….make a conscientious effort to pray one for the other and especially for those who administer the Word and the ordinances in our midst," Rev. Lloyd wrote in the covenant.

Prayer, with healthy doses of diligence and tenacity, worked. This year (1997), Rev. Lloyd’s church – now called the First United Church of Christ – marked its 200^th birthday.

It is a congregation of 319 members, housed in a sturdy brick building that has weathered 128 years. A keystone among the community’s churches – nicknamed "First Church" by members. It has remainded steady but accommodated growth and change. It has built traditions but tried innovations. In the Penn West Conference, the United Church of Christ’s regional association of 154 congregations, the Ebensburg church is 16^th – largest.

The church sprang from the most modest of beginnings. That first congregation worshiped in a simple log building, 20 feet square, that Rev. Lloyd named Ebenezer Chapel. From Ebenezer came the name Ebensburg. It is not clear if Rev. Lloyd drew the name Ebenezer from the Welsh town where he was ordained in 1795. It might have been a memorial to his infant son, Ebenezer, who died while Rev. Lloyd and compatriots were still in the Philadelphia area, awaiting passage west. Perhaps the name was drawn from the stone Samuel erected after the Israelis begged God’s help and routed the Philistines, as recounted in 1 Samuel, 7:12. Samuel called the rock Ebenezer, or Stone of Help, saying, "Thus far, the Lord has helped us."

What is clear is that this congregation, this group who followed Rev. Lloyd, signed on for a meager existence. The Welsh, like much of Europe, viewed the newborn United States as a land of promise. From Wales, the New World seemed an escape from a centuries old homeland beset by grain famines, high taxes and oppression from the ruling English.

"Why are your tyrants great? Because you kneel down and cringe to them," said fiery Baptist minister Morgan John Rhys, a Welshman preaching the then radical notion of minority rights. "Rise up! You are their equals! If you cannot rise, creep to the ocean and the friendly waves will waft you over the Atlantic to the friendly shores of America…..which wants nothing but millions of good citizens."

The waves did not waft the immigrants over. The three-to-four-month voyages could be torturous. Passengers were cramped, hungry and died of disease. On its 13-week voyage – carrying many of the charter members of the Ebensburg church from Bristol, England, to Philadelphia – the vessel Maria ran through at least one severe storm and near-encounters with unfriendly ships. In a letter written after the voyage, Rev. Lloyd recounted the wrenching panic of one sudden squall so severe ‘the ship turned till the mast hit the water." "It came to my mind that Eternity was to be our place instead of America," he wrote. Rev. Lloyd’s contemporary, the Rev. George Roberts – later to become second pastor of the Ebensburg church and an associate judge in Cambria County – wrote in his journal that as the maria neared the safety of Philadelphia in October 1795, the ship’s captain told his passengers, "We do not want your prayers anymore."

The immigrants, though, would need as much of God’s help as they could get. As growing numbers of the Welsh came into the United States, hope grew, then faded, for a Welsh colony in Ohio, organized through the newly-formed Cambrian Company, the creation of Rev. Morgan John Rhys.

Many of the recently-arrived Welshmen were not content to stay in the Great Valley region near Philadelphia and prevailed upon Rhys, who sought help from friend Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signatory to the Declaration of Independence. A deal was struck for 17, 400 acres, what would become Cambria Township, described then as "wilderness of Pennsylvania on top of the Alleghenies." It was land few others were interested in.

On Sept. 20, 1796, the two dozen immigrants set out. They traveled into the Alleghenies on Galbraith Road, the main path through Cambria County, then turned at Munster, finding their way to the preordained homeland as winter settled onto the mountains. "….We had a small cabin of poles not larger than my thigh built, in which we lived pretty contented for two years, sometimes without a bit of bread in the house," Rev. Roberts later wrote.

They weathered the winter. And come spring – and perhaps new hope – the church was founded. This Welsh Independent Church was split in membership between Congregationalists and Calvinistic Methodists. Its statements of faith suggested the church was not exclusionary. "To persecute those of a different judgment or opinion is contrary to the Spirit of the Gospel," wrote Rev. Lloyd, selected as Shepard of the church.

The new congregation would not have easy going. During the first spring, a fresh band of Welsh-bred settlers and skilled laborers arrived and, under the direction of Morgan John Rhys, kept right on going, two miles to the west. There, the newcomers would found Beulah, what the visionary Rhys planned as a progressive settlement, a thriving showpiece in the wilderness. But Beulah would dwindle and die over the next few years.

Maintaining a Welsh enclave in this piece of the Alleghenies would fall to the less adventurous settlers at Ebensburg. During its first years, the little Ebensburg congregation lost members, some to death, some as residents of the newfound village sought their Gwaldfa elsewhere. Rev. Lloyd himself despaired for his settlement. He allowed that likely threw would be "a flourishing community here in time."

"But it is too hard for poor people (to) make a living upon this land on the account of its heavy clearing and slow producings," he wrote in the English which he adopted but never entirely mastered. "I cannot with a clear conscience – encourage my poor countrymen and friends to depend much on this place and ‘tis a heavy trouble to my mind to see honest and industrious people working hard and – not acquire an Independent Situation."

Rev. Lloyd never surrendered his original dream of moving to Ohio, something he did after 21 years I Ebensburg, moving to Paddy’s Run, near Cincinnati. He would have departed sooner, he wrote, "except the over-ruling Providence that ordained me to stay in some extraordinary manner which I cannot relate now."

The Ebensburg church held Sunday and midweek services. Communion was given monthly, unless no wine was to be had. On alternating Wednesdays, members would gather at a gyfeillach, a service wehre they would speak on Christian doctrine or about their own religious experience. And as members kept faith, the lean years passed. Three years after this band of Welshmen hiked into the wilderness, they were putting up better homes. Rev. Lloyd and his family moved to a new dwelling, roughly across East High Street from the present church. Six years later, on the same site, he built an even better home – this one, a stone house that would stand for almost a century.

Rev. Lloyd’s church was moving forward, too. In 1801, 10 people joined. From then to the end of 1809, 19 were received by letter and 29 through the right hand of fellowship – many of them during an 1804 revival. The year of that revival, the congregation built itself a new building, another log church about where the Educational Building now stands. The Cambria County Common Pleas Court held session in the new church from 1807 until 1810. But far from being steeped in official stateliness, the new building retained much of the first church’s trademark austerity. The congregation sat out the service on backless pews; the pulpit resembled a box. But, for the next 28 years, it would do. And when its days as a church were over, the building found new life as a stable, moved to the southeast corner of Center and Sample streets.

As for the original church, time would steal all traces it ever existed. There are no drawings or photographs. No vestiges, not even a hint of a foundation, remain at the site.

Meanwhile, Ebensburg would not remain a fledgling Welsh outpost. In 1805, it was selected county seat of year-old Cambria County – some of the bait for that selection laid when Rev. Lloyd, who owned the land on which much of Ebensburg now stands, offered more than a quarter of his 401 acres for government use.

Far from remaining a Welsh enclave, the town drew settlers from other ethnic backgrounds and other denominations. Rev. Lloyd, though, he would depart. In 1818, almost exactly 21 years after he led his pilgrims to the Allegheny Plateau, Rev. Lloyd took the call to go to Paddy’s Run. He had visited there a year earlier, and wrote later that the Paddy’s Run congregation asked that Ebensburg share its wealth of ministers – a plea later sweetened with a promise that Paddy’s Run would build the new minister a meeting house.

Rev. Roberts and Welsh-born Rev. William Tibbott had worked with Rev. Lloyd as co-pastors at the Ebensburg church. But Rev. Roberts could not leave his associate judgeship in Cambria County, and Rev. Tibbott ran both a grist mill and sawmill here, Rev. Lloyd wrote. "So the request fell to me," he recounted. "I preached my farewell sermon in Ebensburg, November 23, 1817, I John 3:2. The departure was sorrowful on both sides."

The church, though, did not wither. Rev. Roberts, like Rev. Lloyd, was a man with a strict moral code. As a judge, he fined those who worked on Sundays or cursed on any day. As a pastor, assisted by Rev. Tibbott and later Morris Jones, he held tight rein on a church stirring toward a rebirth.

The church organized a Sunday School in 1819. Six years later, it went through another spiritual awakening, welcoming 20 members in just a few months and bringing the rolls to about 200. "In August 1826, it pleased the Lord to make a little stir among the dry bones," Rev. Roberts wrote. "We enjoyed at that time some sweet and precious seasons." The enthusiasm was not confined to Ebensburg. Worshipers wanted to come from farms surrounding the growing borough – but the network of dirt roads made travel long and hard. So they raised their own churches.

In 1830, one set of rural faithful founded Mt. Hermon Welsh Congregational Church one-third mile north of the Colver "T" and four miles north of Ebensburg. In South Ebensburg, members formed their own congregation in 1867.

Mt. Hermon disbanded in 1910, leaving a cemetery and a sign marking the site of the church. But the South Ebensburg church remains, a landmark on a hillside four miles south of its Ebensburg counterpart. South Ebensburg shares the pastor with First United Church of Christ and periodically unites with the Ebensburg church for activities and services. Today, the South Ebensburg church has 65 members on its rolls, bolstered by a very active contingent of youth.

In 1832, the Ebensburg congregation – still the Welsh Independent Church – got its third church building, across Sample Street from the current Educational Building. The building – two stories high, a steeple rising from the front – would become known as "the old, brick church," a $1400 building that Rev. Roberts recounted was paid for promptly. This time, much of the austerity was shaken off, but the structure was still just a distant cousin to the church building First United Church of Christ members know today.

The congregation entered through double doors, men on the right, women on the left. Inside, men sat on the east side of the church, women on the west. The pulpit, high above the sanctuary floor, was well suited to a tall preacher. Were the speaker short, though, only his head bobbed into view. In the early days of the church, a wood burning stove in the center of the sanctuary heated the building. Progress brought coal stoves on both sides of the sanctuary and oil lamps to replace the candles that worshipers used for light. In time, the church building would not be a place just for its own members.

In February 1840, the congregation agreed to share the building with Ebensburg’s fledgling community of Presbyterians – but hardly in an equal partnership. The Presbyterians could join the congregation two Sunday mornings a month. Or they could have the building to themselves twice a month, if they chose to worship on Sunday afternoons.

A decade later, as their number grew, the Presbyterians formed their own congregation, drawing some English-speaking members from their Welsh Independent hosts. With time, as the Welsh Independent Church officially became First Congregational Church, members deemed it wise to "give a little English" during services. But a quarter-century passed before the use of Welsh at Sunday worship seriously eroded. Evening services were conducted in English. But it wasn’t until 1875 – under Rev. Thomas R. Jones, the Congregationalists’ first American-born pastor – that every other Sunday morning service was held in English.

Not for another 11 years, when the Congregational Church was 14 years from the 20^th century, would Welsh be eased out of the services altogether. But disappearance of the language did not mean disappearance of the heritage. In 1997, the church’s list of commonly used hymns continues to include such Welsh standards as "Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah." Interest in the church’s Welsh lineage has been passed to new generations. And a Welsh medley arranged by the church’s late choir director, William Gruver, is a staple for the church choir each March when it marks St. David’s Day, honoring Wales’ patron saint.

A signature of the Ebensburg church has been the longevity of many of its pastors. Eight months before it celebrated its 200^th birthday this year, the congregation called the Rev. William C. Thwing, only its 16^th pastor (That small number is even more impressive, considering that two of those ministers were co-pastors to Rev. Lloyd and Rev. Roberts.) And so it was during the first 42 years of life for the Ebensburg church.

Rev. Lloyd, then Rev. Roberts, occupied the pulpit during that stretch, assisted by Revs. Tibbott and Morris Jones. Welshman William D. Williams held the pastorate from 1839 to 1843. He was installed at a time when membership numbered 109, although church histories show no clear reason for the drop from approximately 200 about 14 years earlier.

Rev Williams was succeeded by the church’s first non-Welsh pastor, English- born John Howes, who resigned in 1847, after four years. Those two relatively short pastorates gave way to Welshman Llewellyn R. Powell, who remained in the Ebensburg pulpit for 17 years, then continued to minister to the north and south churches.

Four of the church’s 16 pastors – two of them brothers – shared the same last name: Jones. Only one of them was not from Wales: The Rev. Thomas R. Jones. Rev. Jones remained for 17 years, from 1867 to 1884, one of his trademarks a powerful hand in the moral conduct of the congregation. Where transgressions were suspected, members were called to answer to church deacons – and often temporarily suspended when deemed guilty. Rev. Jones had signed on for an annual salary of $600.00, a figure set under a then-common practice where the congregation’s leaders would see how well they could prime the financial pump before rendering a final offer. After suggesting a salary, church officials would visit members, asking them to increase their donations enough to cover the minister’s pay. Oly after they had enough commitments in hand would the officers give the salary final approval. The congregation’s willingness to give contributed to the longevity of at least one pastor. Rev. Jones’ successor, the Rev. George Hill, penned his resignation, then rescinded it when his $700 annual salary was increased to $800. He remained in the Ebensburg pulpit a total of eight years.

His departure, in 1892, put the pastorship into the hands of one Welshman who handed the position to his brother six years later – and kept the job in the family for 16 years. In 1892, two years after he arrived from Wales, the Rev. Richard Sirhowy Jones was called to the Ebensburg church fro a Puritan Church in Scranton. Rev Jones oversaw the addition of 92 names to the church rolls and held the reins as the church marked its centennial. But on what was to be a three-month return to Wales in 1898, he wrote back to "a people I love most profoundly and sincerely,’ tendering his resignation so he could mind another brother’s orphaned children and his ailing mother.

Back in Ebensburg, brother J. Twyson Jones, a forceful personality and eloquent preacher, filled the pulpit and was invited to remain. Ten years later, in 1908, he accepted a call to a Congregational Church in Iowa City, Iowa. But before he did, Rev. Jones led the church into the 20^th century, its membership surging from 252 in 1900 to 339 in 1906.

First Congregational Church built its fourth building in 1869, but a casual observer would have to look twice at a photograph of the time to see that this, indeed, is the church still used in 1997. The dimensions were about the same, 80 by 50 feet. But there was no bell tower, no spire. The bell, ordered in 1878, topped a seven-foot-high post along what is now the walkway between the church and the Educational Building.

There was only one entrance, the doors at the southeast corner of the church, the Caroline Street side. If the present-day observer could have peeked inside the brick building, the surprises would continue. The sanctuary was lighted by oil lamps. There were no stained-glass windows. Electricity would not be added until the turn of the century – and then, thanks to donations from a church group. There was no basement. A balcony, what church members called a gallery, sat over what is now the narthex. But even without amenities that have become fixtures today, the new church – total cost: $16,037 – was larger and more finished than its 37-year-old predecessor. (That earlier church got its own form of afterlife. Bricks from the building were used in 2 ½-story brick house on the same site, 211 E. Sample St.)

The new building went through an evolution over the next century. Its trademark bell tower and spire were added during a 1896 remodeling, the spire portion to remain for 46 years, until it was deemed too deteriorated to keep. (The spire would be missed, though. In 1989, 45 years after the original was removed, a fund drive drew $29, 240 for erection of a new one.)

A pipe organ was installed during the 1896 remodeling, its console behind the alter, in the recess that now holds pipes and bellows. The console would remain there for 51 years. Pews of ash and walnut gave way to oak models with cushions – a sort of luxury of church worship, like the electric lights added in 1901 and the Sunday morning church bulletins, introduced in 1920.

The indirect overhead lighting in the sanctuary came in 1942, largely through fund raising efforts by the Men’s Sunday School Class. Even as improvements were added, through, it often seemed the church building would not meet the congregation’s needs. Members pondered prospects for a new building, backed away from that idea and went partway toward easing a space shortage by digging a basement under the church, a major project they shouldered in 1932, even as the Great Depression brought hard times.

Today, that basement is used largely as a preparation area for the church choir, contains a finished play area for children and is given over for use weekday nights for Girl Scout meetings and sessions for Alcoholic Anonymous.

Until 1959, though, the basement was a social center for the church. The main body of the basement was used for anything from church suppers to wedding receptions, holding up to 250, who were served from the basement kitchen. If that seems a distant echo from the amenities available in today’s Educational Building, consider the facilities before the 1932 excavation. Then, church suppers were prepared in a kitchen on the second floor, meaning food had to be toted up the steep steps from the ground floor. Even when the 1932 construction cleared both the narthex – then called simply "the little room" – and the room above for Sunday School classes, this landmark church building was straining at the seams.

For 76 years, the pastor was not just the spiritual leader of the church; he was the next-door neighbor. The parsonage was built to the west of the church, seeded by $500 bequest from former Cambria County Sheriff Thomas Griffith. The three-story frame house, its front even with the front of the church, was home to five pastors and their families, starting with the Rev. Richard Sirhowy Jones.

The total cost of the parsonage is nor recorded, but seven years afterward, a $600 debt remaining on the construction was paid off - thanks, in part, to generosity from churchgoers who regularly came from the Pittsburgh area to summer in the cool of the Cambria County mountains.

C.T. Roberts, church secretary and treasurer for 24 years, repeatedly urged retirement of the debt – just as he exhorted members right up to the month he died to make good on their pledges.

Mr. Roberts, in a statement that would ring familiar to many congregations in many different eras, told fellow Congregationalists, "It would be better not to subscribe than to subscribe and not pay."

In 1969, church members voted to demolish the parsonage. The replacement was a modern, split-level home, purchased from $35,000 at Crestwood Estates, then a fledgling development southwest of town. This time the debt was retired in two years. In 1996, hunting a new minister and steered by a trend among new pastors to build equity by purchasing their own homes, the church voted to sell the parsonage. But the move was halted as a pastoral search committee focused on the Rev. William Thwing, and Rev. Thwing, in turn, expressed a desire to live in the parsonage.

In 1989, it was possible for a 76-year-old person to have been a lifelong member of this church and have lived through the tenure of only two pastors. Rev Twyson Jones’ successor in the Ebensburg pulpit was a New Englander, the Rev. Henry H. Gurnsey, a man who entered the ministry at 39, after careers in New Haven, Conn., as a newspaper reporter, a contractor and a city councilman. Rev. Gurnsey’s stay in Ebensburg lasted only three years, although he returned to New England and preached for another 23 years, delivering his last sermon just a month before he died at age 68. But he gave way to an era where the Rev. John R. Thomas and the Rev. Edmund Jenkins were responsible for three-quarters of a century of pastorship – more than one-third of the life of this church.

Rev. Thomas – a native of Radnor, Ohio, a graduate of the Theological Seminary at Princeton, N.J. – was in the pulpit of Pittsburgh’s McDevitt Place Calvanistic Methodist Church for seven years when he accepted the call in 1913 to come to Ebensburg.

The next four decades would form a tight bond between the church and this pastor members remembered as stately and dignified, eloquent from the pulpit. In her 1947 history of the church, historian Marian Francis termed Rev. Thomas "beloved and respected." Rev. Thomas was active beyond his Ebensburg church, from leadership in the Congregational state conference to directorship of the Ebensburg YMCA, then in the building now restored as the Noon-Collins Inn.

In 1935, his undergraduate alma mater, Ripon College in Wisconsin, granted him an honorary doctorate in theology. The pastor and wife Eleanor had four children, one who died in infancy, the others raised in Ebensburg.

When Mrs. Thomas died in 1935 of a heart ailment, the church mourned and the Deacon Board remembered her as "quiet, sympathetic, unassuming….a most faithful, sincere and devoted member."

Two years later, the church would show its appreciation for Rev. Thomas’ service, sending him on a 60-day trip to the Holy Land. "When his pastorate ends here," church member Herman T. Jones wrote in a 1947 tribute, "it will be a difficult task to find his equal."

The job fell to the Rev. F. Edmund Jenkins, a young pastor fresh from six years at Bethel Congregational Church in Nanticoke, just southwest of Wilkes-Barre. Rev. Jenkins, a Latrobe native, would not be just another pastor. Like Rev. Thomas, he became an institution, the dean among local clergymen.

Rev. Thomas resigned in 1951, just shy of his 38^th anniversary, a record in the Ebensburg pulpit. He died in 1968. Rev. Jenkins remained for more than 38 years, a new record for the local church.

"Arriving in Ebensburg," he wrote this year, "I found the church to be everything I had pictured. The members were hard-working and agreeable to trying various efforts to further their efforts as a church, working hard to follow the ‘call’ to service."

The tributes flowed both ways. Rev. Jenkins and wife Margaret, known to the congregation as "Peg," quickly became "well-known, not only by members of the church but also by the entire community," veteran church member William Evans wrote 25 years ago. Rev. Jenkins offered no pomp from the pulpit, yet he delivered sermons that were relevant and often powerful.

"Many of our members feel that his delivery and eloquence on Sunday mornings are without equal in Ebensburg," Mr. Evans noted. Other tributes were a trifle more informal. In 1976, when the church honored Rev. and Mrs. Jenkins for a quarter-century of service, the 230 people gathered at the tribute dinner appropriated the tune from the old college fight song – On, Wisconsin! – and sang, "Reverend Ed! Reverend Ed! He’s the best there is…"

"I always felt the strength of the church was its people," Rev. Jenkins wrote this year. "I sought to make this ‘the people’s church.’" The Jenkinses raided their four children, Neil, Marcia, Gary and Beth, in Ebensburg, and Rev. Jenkins forged strong links into the community, through organizations such as Rotary and his presidency of Summit Lodge 312, Free and Accepted Masons. He held leadership roles beyond the local church, was elected moderator of the Congregational state conference early in his Ebensburg career, then acted as founding father for the United Church of Christ’s Somerset Association.

But, Rev Jenkins kept a guiding hand on his home church as it moved through the second half of the 20^th century. He was at the helm as the church officially became The united Church of Christ, undertook its single largest building project of the century – construction of the Educational Building – and took such major steps as reworking its bylaws and adopting a new curriculum for its Sunday School.

Even after Rev. Jenkins’ resignation in 1989, as First United Church of Christ weathered two stretches without permanent pastors, he was regularly summoned back to Ebensburg from his new home in Ligonier and the interim pastorship he now holds in Brush Creek, Westmoreland County.

"Rev. Ed has continued to be ever-present when called upon to officiate at funerals and weddings, visit the sick and bereaved and give advice to our clergy," veteran church member Roger Hughes wrote.

The Ebensburg church was adept at growing, accommodating, adapting. Forty years ago, the major change came from outside, with the marriage of the Congregational and Christian Church to the Evangelical and Reformed Church. The result was the Cleveland-based United Church of Christ, now 1.5 million members strong nationwide.

It was a union almost two decades in the making, bitterly contested in some churches. "In Ebensburg," Rev. Jenkins later wrote, "it proceeded smoothly under the fine leadership of Rev. Dr. John Thomas."

The Congregationalists, who merged with the Christian Churches (separate from Disciples of Christ Church) in 1931, were rooted in Wales and England, and sprang from the union of Puritans and Pilgrims in 1648. As an 1893 manual for the Ebensburg church noted, a Congregational Church "is complete within itself," open to choose its own creed and officers, admit and exclude members, and worship "subject to the authority of Christ, its only head."

The Evangelical and Reformed Church is rooted back to the Reformed Church founded by German settlers in Pennsylvania, and to the Evangelical Synod of North America, a union of German evangelical pastors in Missouri. In 1960, members of the Ebensburg church accepted the constitution of the United Church of Christ and three years later changed the name of the church (while accommodating local roots) to First United Church of Christ – Congregational 1797.

As the church entered the second half of the 20^th century, it was once again squeezed for space. This time, though, members didn’t answer with a new church or extensive renovations. They funded an idea that had been under consideration for years – construction of an Educational Building separate from the church.

Five committees were formed to study all facets of the plan; four delegates were dispatched to a building seminar in Atlanta. The evolution of ideas yielded a brick building a half-block long and two stories high, with a roomy kitchen and large dining room on the second floor and classrooms on the first.

Offices for the pastor and church secretary sit along a large stairway landing on the north side of the building. The building went to construction in December 1958; less than 10 months later, it was dedicated. Seven years after the first earth was moved, the $76,000.00 cost was paid off.

But the congregation put up more than a building. It created a new center for life in the church. Activities that had been cramped in the church building poured into the Educational Building. Sunday School classes – from toddlers to adults – filled the classrooms before church.

The second floor became a center for church activities ranging from Christmas pageants and covered-dish dinners to craft shows and semi-annual turkey-and-biscuit dinners where church members scramble to serve about 800 customers a day.

And the activity isn’t confined to church members. The church has opened the Educational Building to blood drives and Multi-Phasic Blood Analysis programs, where several hundred people are ushered through for blood tests.

Ambitious as the Educational Building construction was, it did not dampen the congregation’s courage for more major projects. A year after the congregation burned the Educational Building mortgage, the church launched into installation of a $23,500.00 pipe organ to replace one that had been rebuilt two decades earlier. In 1968, the job was complete. First United Church of Christ remained one of three churches in town with a pipe organ, an instrument now complemented by a baby grand piano given in 1994 in memory of long-time church member Martha Jones.

With each major project completed, though, there was another to be tackled. Without fail, members rose to the occasion to offer financial backing. New sidewalks and a handicapped-accessible ramp were added at the church in 1980. In 1982, the church’s 86-year-old stained glass windows were shored up and covered with protective glass, $25,000.00 worth of prevention against a warning that the aging windows could sag and shatter. In 1989, a crane sidled toward the church and gently lowered a steeple spire into place, restoring a piece that had been missing for almost a half-century. A new roof went on the church in 1994. And the list will grow longer.

Bricks-and-mortar buildings only house the church. The flesh-and-blood members make the church. First United Church of Christ’s 200-year history – and its current membership rolls – contain names of members who were stalwart workers in a host of activities from teaching Sunday School to serving church dinners to singing in the church choir and acting as links in the church prayer chain.

"The Church Council, Pilgrim Club, Pilgrim Daughters, Men’s Fellowship, Church School, Young Adults, all labored to keep the church an effective unit for the work of serving our Lord," Rev. Jenkins wrote.

Church efforts have extended from support of the local Food Pantry, which aids this economically stressed region, to cleanup work in the aftermath of the 1977 Johnstown flood.

A series of organizations – the Ladies’ Aid Society, Progress Club, Youth Fellowship, Cradle Club to name just a few – have come and vanished. Today’s church includes the Women’s Fellowship, Pilgrim Club and Pilgrim Daughters and the scope of activities extends from church and community betterment projects to support for the needy. Sometimes, these volunteers work in groups. Sometimes, they labor in solitude. Some have been faithful members for more than a half-century. Some are relatively new to First United Church of Christ. But with regularity, their church summons, and they respond.

First United Church of Christ entered the 1990s and prepared for its 200^th birthday amid mixed prospects. The church faced the same membership erosion many of its mainline Protestant counterparts wrestled with, and a rift within the local ranks in the early 1990s cost First United Church of Christ several members who had been deeply involved in church activities.

The church drifted through two periods without fulltime pastors. It also saw fewer youth joining and helping maintain church programs shouldered by long-time members. But as First United Church of Christ drew closer to that 200^th birthday, its fortunes appeared to brighten. The congregation hired veteran pastor Rev. William C. Thwing, who has spent the first six months of his pastorate in a mix of healing and energy that extends from youngsters to prospective members to long-time members of the church. Attendance began to increase. A sense of unity resurfaced.

The church still showed itself able to tackle large projects.

This was extracted from "First Church" – A Bicentennial History of Ebensburg’s first United Church of Christ. It was provided to me by Mary B. DeMunecas

Data was compiled by Karen Templeton and Thomas H. Gibb and published by the Mountaineer Herald in 1997

The following are acknowledged in the publication:

Rev. William Thwing

Mrs. Lois Gruver and Mrs. Joy Thwing

Miss Frances James and Mr. Elwyn Summers

Rev. F. Edmund Jenkins, Roger Hughes and John L. Gray

Dr. Richard Davis

Mrs. Laverne Ott

Mrs. Dora Sickles

Mr. David Thompson

Miss Marian Francis

9/14/2003 (Digitized by C. E. Creery)