Father Pitt

Why should the beautiful die?


Ingomar Methodist Episcopal Church

Ingomar Methodist Episcopal Church

This is an old congregation, founded in 1837, and its adjoining cemetery has some stones dating from shortly after that. It has grown continuously; the building you see here was designed by Chauncey W. Hodgdon and built in 1915, and encrusted with additions fore and aft in later years. But the congregation (still Methodist, but advertising itself these days just as “Ingomar Church”) outgrew this church and built a much bigger one across the street; this is now the Ingomar Church Community Life Center.

Front of the church

The 1915 church was originally built very cheaply; its final cost of about $9,000 was roughly equivalent to the price of two middle-class houses at the time. A good history of the church was written in 1962 by Margaret L. Sweeney, and we take our information from that booklet (but we have corrected the spelling of the architect’s name).

Steeple
Ingomar Church Community Life Center
Ingomar M. E. Church
Rear of the church
Ingomar Church, new building
Kodak EasyShare Z1285; Fujifilm FinePix HS10.

The new building across the street is in a grandiose New Classical style that recalls colonial New England churches and refracts them through a Postmodernist lens.

Ingomar is an unincorporated community that straddles two municipalities. Most of the church grounds and the cemetery are in the borough of Franklin Park, but the border with McCandless Township runs diagonally through this building.

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2 responses to “Ingomar Methodist Episcopal Church”

  1. One of those things that I really want to sit down and figure out one of these days: What are Greater Pittsburgh’s oldest extant churches in terms of either:

    1. Continuous use of a building or

    2. Uninterrupted life of a congregation.

    The Lutheran church that I grew up in in Washington County dated to 1791, but the building was the 4th on the property, built in 1911.

    • Both of those would be good questions to answer. Certainly Old St. Luke’s in Woodville (Scott Township) would be one of the oldest congregations around here, if you made certain allowances. The congregation was founded in 1765, only seven years after the French fled Fort Duquesne. The allowance is that the congregation is no longer independent; it disbanded in 1930, but the church is still used for services presided over by the clergy of St. Paul’s in Mount Lebanon. As the Old St. Luke’s Web site says (moderating its expectations in a suitably Episcopalian way), “The very existence of Old Saint Luke’s today is short of miraculous.”

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