Main content
Central Evangelical Lutheran Church records
Notifications
Held at: Historical Society of the Phoenixville Area [Contact Us]204 Church St., Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, 19460
This is a finding aid. It is a description of archival material held at the Historical Society of the Phoenixville Area. Unless otherwise noted, the materials described below are physically available in their reading room, and not digitally available through the web.
Overview and metadata sections
Central Evangelical Lutheran Church was organized in Phoenixville, Chester County, Pennsylvania on Christmas Day, 1875. Around the same time it acquired the local Mennonite Meeting House building, which the area's Lutheran community had already been using on alternate weeks for two years. The oldest religious site in Phoenixville, the meeting house was built in 1794 on land given by Jacob Buckwalter. The Mennonite population in the area diminished over the 19th century, and in the 1870s they began allowing local Lutherans to worship in their space. Over the decades that followed, Central Lutheran re-built and added to the building.
After the Central Evangelical Lutheran Church closed, the Historical Society of the Phoenixville Area acquired the building.
Bibliography:
Central Evangelical Lutheran Church. "75th Anniversary, 1875-1950." Booklet found in collection.
This collection includes: Church Council minutes, 1892-1968; treasurer's reports, 1883-1968; Ladies Aid Society minutes, 1905-1949; Altar Guild and "Joy" Sunday school records; and membership, attendance, merger, and various other records of the church. Of special interest is a volume of the Ministerial Acts of Reverend William G. Brubaker, 1899-1911, including calls received, sermons, and officiations at funerals, marriages, baptisms, and special events. The collection also includes some printed materials, such as hymnals and books used by the church and publications created by the church.
Most materials gift of John Westerman, 2009 (accession number 2009.14).
Summary descriptive information on this collection was compiled in 2012-2014 as part of a project conducted by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania to make better known and more accessible the largely hidden collections of small, primarily volunteer run repositories in the Philadelphia area. The Hidden Collections Initiative for Pennsylvania Small Archival Repositories (HCI-PSAR) was funded by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
This is a preliminary finding aid. No physical processing, rehousing, reorganizing, or folder listing was accomplished during the HCI-PSAR project.
In some cases, more detailed inventories or finding aids may be available on-site at the repository where this collection is held; please contact Historical Society of the Phoenixville Area directly for more information.
Organization
Subject
Place
- Publisher
- Historical Society of the Phoenixville Area
- Finding Aid Author
- Finding aid prepared by Celia Caust-Ellenbogen and Faith Charlton through the Historical Society of Pennsylvania's Hidden Collections Initiative for Pennsylvania Small Archival Repositories
- Sponsor
- This preliminary finding aid was created as part of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania's Hidden Collections Initiative for Pennsylvania Small Archival Repositories. The HCI-PSAR project was made possible by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
- Access Restrictions
-
Contact Historical Society of the Phoenixville Area for information about accessing this collection.