According to the parish history at the diocesan site, this church was built in 1900, after previous buildings had been destroyed by fire twice in the 1890s. In old Pa Pitt’s opinion, the black tinted window coverings do the church no favors, but no one asked him.
Behind the church is a cemetery remarkable for its precipitous slope, which makes it necessary for some plots to be terraced.
This old house was probably built in the middle 1800s, but the simple vernacular style of it makes it hard to date with any precision. It was obviously put up at a time when the main street of Noblestown was more a path than a road; now anyone stepping out the front door has to be careful of traffic. (The church in the background is the Noblestown Methodist Episcopal Church.)
This somewhat larger house is almost identical in layout; it probably just has larger rooms in the main part of the house. The porch is a later addition—probably from the first quarter of the twentieth century, to judge by the Craftsman-style tapered pillars and rusticated concrete blocks.
Yesterday we looked at the Oakdale Public School, one of the earliest commissions for James E. Allison. Here, just a short distance to the west in the old village of Noblestown, is another Allison building1 from a little over a year later—a small frame church that, although it has been coated with artificial siding, still retains some of its distinctive character. The form is the irregular square popular in small Romanesque churches of Victorian times, but the details are Georgian, including the big window. The half-round protrusion in front indicates a Sunday-school room built on the popular Akron Plan. The congregation dissolved a few years ago, but the building is in use by a veterans’ organization called Heroes Supporting Heroes.
