Dr. Milton Loyer, Conference Archivist
July – 100 years ago.
On Sunday, July 2, 1922, the parishioners of Harrisburg’s Epworth Methodist Episcopal Church marched from the large temporary wooden tabernacle at 20th and Derry Streets in which they had been meeting to their new stone church building. The congregation had begun in 1890 when 88 persons met in the East End School House on 21st Street to organize a Sunday School. A church building was dedicated at 21st and Derry in 1891, and added to in 1899 and 1902. The original frame building was razed to make way for the new stone sanctuary on the same site. Formally dedicated in September by Bishop McDowell, the structure was modeled after First Church, Altoona, home church of the then current pastor Homer C. Knox.
Epworth’s membership peaked at 891 in 1963. In 1986 Epworth and Derry Street (formerly United Brethren) formed a two-point charge in the Allison Hill area, and in 2005 the church was closed. The building was sold and now houses the Bethany AME congregation.
August – 50 years ago
The Mt. Pleasant Church in Rosecrans, on the three-point Sugar Valley charge, was formally sold to the Mt. Pleasant Community Church in August 1972. The building had been erected by the Evangelical Association in 1893, and the pastor and congregation left the denomination in 1968 – although it would be almost four years before all the arrangements were completed. The congregation continues today as the Mt. Pleasant Bible Church.
Located in southern Clinton County, Sugar Valley became an Evangelical stronghold in the 1830’s and contained seven Evangelical Association church buildings in at the time of the 1894 denominational split – after which the United Evangelical dissenters erected six church buildings of their own. The two groups re-united in 1922 and combined congregations until the 1968 Sugar Valley charge consisted of three churches. Mt. Pleasant was the only surviving Evangelical Association congregation, as the two remaining United Methodist congregations at Greenburr and Loganton had originally been United Evangelical.
