Churches in the photo collection
The final twelve pages of Mount Union’s 1967 centennial section surveyed churches serving the borough and nearby communities. This page preserves the dates and milestones reported in that edition as historical information, not as a directory of present-day congregations.
Names, affiliations and meeting places can change. For current addresses, services and contact information, use the churches section of the community directory. The entries below reflect the newspaper’s 1967 terminology.
Methodist worship was reported to have begun with a service led by the Rev. Jacob Gruber. A first worship house followed in 1850, and the later church was dedicated May 18, 1913.
Presbyterian congregation: the centennial history placed its beginning in 1845.
Catholic worship: the newspaper reported services in the John Dougherty home by 1848. A 1912 construction contract with T. C. Peduzzi preceded the opening of St. Catherine’s church in 1913.
First Baptist Church was organized in 1903, according to its centennial profile.
St. Luke Lutheran was identified as founded in 1913, while the Christian and Missionary Alliance congregation traced its start to 1916.
Mount Hope Baptist and Mount Union Baptist were both placed in 1914; Mount Hope’s first church followed in 1917. Bethel AME was reported active from 1919.
Cedar Crest–Lucy Furnace began as a Sunday school serving the area, according to the 1967 retrospective.
Mount Union Assembly traced its beginning to 1936. Pilgrim Holiness organized in summer 1938 and erected its building at 609 South Jefferson Street in 1942.
The edition pictured the church near the Route 522 bridge, a landmark whose onion dome remains one of the area’s most recognizable religious architectural features.
Included among the congregations and church photographs assembled in the special section.
Documented in the church survey along with an Allenport-area church photograph, showing the section’s reach beyond the borough limits.
In an interview presented in WPSU’s Black History Keepers, Pastor Sylvia Morris described Mount Union’s Bethel AME, Mount Hope Missionary Baptist and Tabernacle Church of God in Christ congregations. Her recollections connect their early meetings in homes with the experience of families arriving from places including Virginia and Arkansas.
Morris’s account adds the life within the institutions: worship, children’s religious education and community service. It complements the newspaper chronology above while preserving the speaker’s perspective. Because the program reuses an earlier interview, relative ages mentioned in it should not be used to calculate exact founding years.
Source: WPSU / PBS, Black History Keepers (2022), Sylvia Morris interview.