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This is From the Archives, where we present something from our extensive collection of archival photos, records and all manner of materials dating back to when the church was First Methodist Episcopal, to First Methodist, to Church of the Savior, to St. Paul's to Crossroads.
As most of you reading this know, our church, Crossroads United Methodist Church, is the combination of two formerly independent congregations, Church of the Savior United Methodist and St Paul's United Methodist.
While Church of the Savior started its life as The First Methodist Episcopal Church and ended up as Church of the Savior across two centuries, St Paul's United Methodist has its own interesting and unique history, beginning as St Paul's United Brethren Church in Christ in 1923-24 (as an offshoot of the already-existing First United Brethren Church) before eventually becoming St Paul's United Methodist.
We have almost entirely featured archives items in this section of the Chronicle Weekly gathered by Virginia Gingrich as the Church of the Savior historian. But we now have some recently-discovered St Paul's items that were saved and archived as well, and we will feature some of those over the next few weeks, beginning with these items today.
The first item is a group of just a few scanned pages of a much longer book written by one Mrs James E Johnston, who was listed as President of the church's Woman's Missionary Society in 1930 and is credited on the title page as historian. These isolated pages detail how the land for the church was purchased in 1921, the first floor and front and side entrances were completed and dedicated on July 13, 1924, and then the entire original structure was finally finished and dedicated by March 30, 1930.
The book is much longer than just what is included here, and goes into great detail about the life of the church as it moved from being a United Brethren church to an Evangelical United Brethren church to a United Methodist church.
The second item is a saved bulletin from that 1930 dedication service, led by the Reverend Sager Tryon. In fact, there were three services that Sunday, all listed in the bulletin, and it's not clear whether this was the usual practice for the church or if they had three services that day just because it was a special occasion.
And the third item is a picture of the St Paul's congregation and sanctuary taken sometime in 1960 or 1961.
We will feature more such items from St Paul's history, including some pictures of some familiar faces, in the coming weeks - so stay tuned!.
(Click to open the PDFs and images in new windows.)
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