Father Pitt

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.

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).

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.