Church:Pastors and People Contributed by Roxie Kline USGENWEB NOTICE: Printing this file by non-commercial individuals and libraries is encouraged, as long as all notices and submitter information is included. Any other use, including copying files to other sites requires permission from the submitters PRIOR to uploading to any other sites. We encourage links to the state and county table of contents. _________________________________________________________________ The following is copied from "Pastors and People", Section "Congregations." Page 423: SCHUYLKILL COUNTY The legislature created Schuylkill county on March 11, 1811 by taking townships from Berks and Northampton counties and placing them in the new political subdivision. Germans were among the first people to move north of the "Blue Hills" or "Blue mountains" after these lands were purchased from the Indians in 1749 and thrown open to settlement. Many of the pioneers were driven south across the mountains during the French and Indian war. Some did not return until after 1764, when peace was restored at the end of Pontiac's rebellion. As late as 1793, what is now Schuylkill county was still a frontier area, with population of little more than three thousand. There is evidence to support the existence of three Lutheran and one Reformed congregations in 1776. This number had increased to nine or ten by 1793. All but one of these congregations were located in the southern townships bordering Berks and Lehigh counties. Only one German clergyman is known to have lived in Schuylkill county before 1793. He was the Reformed Henry DECKER, who appeared on a 1779 tax list for Brunswick township, but may have lived there earlier. Unfortunately, there are no available records to indicate how active a ministry he carried on or how long he continued in it. Other ministers came across the mountains to serve the people in Schuylkill county. Daniel SCHUMACHER came from Lehigh county and William KURTZ from Lebanon. In the 1790s the latter was reported as serving two congregations "over the Blue mountains." Daniel WAGNER served Summer Hill while he was pastor of the Tulpehocken charge. Pages 423 & 424: FRIEDENS There may have been a Lutheran congregation in what is now East Brunswick township since the 1750s. There was certainly a union church there by 1796-1798. In 1898 H. A. WELLER published 'Friedens Church at the Little Schuylkill: A History of the Congregations and Community.' Weller was an attorney who had become a Lutheran pastor. After identifying the pioneers who crossed the Blue mountains in the 1740s and early 1750s, he quoted from an unrecorded deed of surveyor Benjamin LIGHTFOOT, dated April 6, 1753, to Frederick BENSINGER and John KUEHNLE, conveying one acre forty-six perches, "so long as sun and moon shall exist, for the purpose of erecting and maintaining thereon a Lutheran church and school" for the "Lutheran German people in the vicinity of the Little Schuylkill, in Berks County." (p.40) Weller also quoted from a document reportedly dated 1768 and requesting Deacon Jacob WETSTEIN to take steps to acquire additional land. Finally, the author pointed to communion ware of Friedens church bearing the dates 1756 and 1780. Yet Weller had to admit that there was no credible evidence of a church building, indeed none even of an actual congregation, before about 1790. Whether a formally organized congregation existed in the 1750s, he wrote, was "a matter of tradition rather than of record." (p. 22) It is strange that the threat and reality of Indian attacks would disrupt the life of Zion in Brunswick, seven miles away, during the French and India War, and yet have no apparent impact upon a Friedens congregation. It is equally strange, if such a congregation existed from the 1750s, that Weller could not identify any of its pastors until forty years later. Daniel SCHUMACHER, the Lutheran minister most likely to have been called upon by people living across the Blue mountains in what is now eastern Schuylkill county, recorded no baptisms for children of the first ten pioneers along the Little Schuylkill whom Weller identifies in his work. It is possible that the land which Benjamin Lightfoot reportedly sold in 1753 was used for a schoolhouse in which religious services were held from time to time, but there does not appear to be any corroborating evidence even for this statement. On April 1, 1791 Jacob Wetstein and Jacob Bensinger, trustees "of the Protestant Congregation and School in Brunswick Township," secured a warrant for fifteen acres" (In Trust for the use of the said Congregation to erect a School House thereon) including an improvement." Interest was scheduled to begin October 1, 1790, which can be taken to be the approximate time when the congregation began using the warranted land. No patent deed was issued for this land until September 1, 1873, when the Commonwealth gave a clear title for twenty-six acres forty perches to Jacob SCHAFER and John HEISER, "trustees of the Friedens Church of the Lutheran and Reformed Congregations of East Brunswig." (Berks Warrant W-161; Copied Survey D-19, p. 249; and Patent H-72, p.231 BLR) Clearly there was a congregation in 1790, and it was probably Lutheran at that time. In 1796 its members entered into an agreement with a newly organized Reformed congregation to build a union church, which was dedicated on October 19, 1798. No pastor before Daniel E. SCHAEFFER, whose earliest record is dated 1794, has been identified. Friedens church, with Lutheran and United Church of Christ congregations, is located about one-half mile west of New Ringgold, on Route 443. Page 424 ; FRIEDENSBURG These congregations in Wayne township were probably organized in 1796 rather than 1791, as has been claimed. Neither the Lutheran Andrew SCHULTZE nor the Reformed John GOBRECHT, who supposedly encouraged beginning a church at this place, was in the ministry in 1791. Baptismal and communicant records begin in July 1796. The first church was begun in 1796 and was dedicated in the spring of 1797 by Emmanuel SCHULTZE and Henry HERTZEL. The union agreement was terminated in 1968. Both Lutheran and United Church of Christ congregations are called St. John's and are located near Friedensburg. Page 424: GUNKLE'S Jacob GUNKLE (1746-1813) was a miller and tavernkeeper in Pine Grove township. It was around his holdings that the village of Pine Grove developed. According to the traditional account, Gunkle built a log schoolhouse for his Reformed neighbors, who used it also for worship services until he built a church for them about 1782. Jacob's church, founded about the same time not far away, was available to meet the needs of the Lutherans in the community. Not until December 14, 1802 did Gunkle deed to William SHARTLE and Frederick SCHNOKE, trustees, the property on which the church and school stood. With the evidence at hand, it is not possible to corroborate this traditional account, but it may be true. When a new church was built in pine Grove in 1816-1817, it was by this Reformed congregatin and a newly organized Lutheran congregation. The Reformed left this church in 1900 and formed their own. The first pastor of Gunkle's church was supposedly a man named GAENSEL, not otherwise identified. The Reformed congregation is now St. Peter's United Church of Christ, pine Grove. Source: Arthur C. Thompson and Orville R. Frantz, "History of Schuylkill Classis of the Eastern Synod of the Reformed Church in the United States, 1885-1940," typescript in ERHS, Lancaster.