Built in 1852 for a congregation established in 1765, Old St. Luke’s is a picturesque country church with a churchyard stuffed with Revolutionary War veterans. For some time it was abandoned and falling to bits, but over the past few decades careful restoration has gradually turned it into a picture-perfect wedding chapel. Much work has recently been put into the churchyard, with illegible tombstones supplemented by new granite monuments that duplicate the old inscriptions.
This plaque honors congregation founder John Neville, George Washington’s childhood friend and the man who, as tax collector for the district, found himself on the wrong side of the Whiskey Rebellion. His house at Bower Hill was burned by the rebels. The plaque was installed only when everyone who would have spat on it was dead.
This huge oak is probably as old as the congregation, and certainly older than the present building. It was recently recognized as a “witness tree”—a tree that has seen the whole history of the United States from the beginning. Wisely, the tree keeps its opinions on that history to itself.
Oliver Miller was one of the early settlers by most standards: he moved here in 1772. Nevertheless, he was not the first European settler on this site: a certain Silas Deckster or Dackster or Daxter (or some similar spelling: names were often spelled several different ways out here on the frontier) had owned the land before him.1
The Miller family are famous for having more or less provoked the Whiskey Rebellion, which broke out into open hostility when the federal marshal showed up at the nearby home of Oliver’s son William in 1794 (Oliver had died in 1782) to serve a writ for failing to pay the whiskey tax.
The Old Stone Manse we see today had not yet been built by the time of the Whiskey Rebellion: it was built by Oliver’s son James, who inherited the property. A log house stood here in Oliver’s time. In the late 1700s, a stone kitchen was added in the back. Then, in 1808, the smaller stone section we see here on the right side of the house was added. Finally, in 1830, the old log house was replaced with the larger stone main house—the section in the picture below.
Although the house was never really designed—it just occurred over a number of decades—it nevertheless makes a pleasing sight. We are reminded of what Charles Stotz, our pioneer preservationist, wrote about these early unpretentious farmhouses: “Their quiet lines and excellent mass are wholly satisfying. It seems that in the essential qualities of architectural design their builders, curiously enough, were capable of doing no wrong; and instinctive good taste is demonstrated in the thoughtful choice of site and the placing of the building with relationship to its surroundings.”2 Stotz described this house in particular as “one of the best preserved examples of indigenous domestic architecture.”3
The springhouse is older than the main house, and may even have been built by Mr. Deckster before Oliver Miller bought the land. We are told by Wikipedia’s sparsely sourced article that a date stone was recently found with a date that some people read as 1765, but others as 1785.
A log house on the grounds is easier to date: a date stone near the top of the chimney clearly reads “1988.” The timbers and stones are a little too neatly cut for an eighteenth-century house, but it does give us a good idea of what a log house of pioneer days was like.
A Pennsylvania bank barn is also on the grounds. Bank barns are built on slopes to give two floors ground-level access, which makes storing hay and keeping animals much more efficient. Imagine having to carry your cows upstairs every time you wanted to put them away.
Father Pitt is especially fond of Old St. Luke’s, partly for its history (its congregation was at the center of the Whiskey Rebellion), but mostly for its situation in a picturesque country churchyard.
Under layers of later accretions is a Revolution-era house that belonged to the Neville family. When General Neville, an old Washington crony, was appointed collector of the Washington administration’s very unpopular whiskey tax in 1794, the Whiskey Rebellion broke out: rioters burned Bower Hill, General Neville’s home, and he fled for his life to this house, which belonged to his son.
This was a southern gentleman’s house: the Nevilles were from Virginia, and settled here in Yohogania County when Virginia claimed this part of the world. They kept slaves in the 1700s; Pennsylvania abolished slavery in stages.
The house has been lovingly restored and is now a museum open Sunday afternoons. Inside, among many treasures, is an original 1815 Clementi pianoforte, bought for the house in 2006.
