The church that once stood on 32 Church Street in Waynesburg is long gone, but this postcard remains to remind us that high Gothic was quite the style in 1880 when the Presbyterians decided to upgrade from their modest meetinghouse on Morris Street and build something lofty and grand right next door to the Greene County Courthouse.
The postcard is owned by Brice and Linda Rush, and is just one of the many rare historic snapshots digitized for the Greene Connections Archives Project.
A quick Google search of the archives project finds a photo from the Waynesburg Borough archives of the Presbyterian Church Street choir, a beautifully captured moment from the turn of the last century.
These Presbyterians of the old order were latecomers when they established themselves in Waynesburg in 1842 with 18 members. Cumberland Presbyterians had built their first “brick church on the hill” on the south side of the town commons on land that would soon become Waynesburg College 11 years earlier in 1831.
According to historian G. Wayne Smith, during the “Second Awakening” of 1800, there were passionate month-long revivals in the hills of Tennessee. There, Cumberland Presbyterians broke from the established Presbyterian Church over “doctrinal differences and practices” and formed their own branch. Their self appointed ministers became missionaries for their frontier tempered view of Scripture. Revivals were held as they worked their way back East and by 1831, churches were established in Jefferson, Carmichaels and Waynesburg.
Soon there were congregations at Clarksville, Muddy Creek, Jacksonville (Wind Ridge), Nineveh, Ten Mile, West Union, Clay Lick, and Hewitts as the new interpretation spread.
By 1880, the new Presbyterian congregation had grown strong enough to build beside the courthouse and the narrow one-way street became Church Street. The gas and oil boom was underway and Waynesburg and its people were prosperous. When the church rededicated itself in 1894, it had a new 60-foot addition on its north side, electric lights, a handsomely frescoed interior and a boiler heating system with heat supplied “from the county buidings across the street.” A new parsonage was built at the corner of Richhill and Greene streets in 1897 and the Presbyterians of Church Street appeared ready for the 20th century.
But reconciliation was in the air. A nationwide union between the two branches of the faith was approved in 1905 and Waynesburg College altered its charter to recognize the merger. The congregations continued holding services in their respective churches as they planned their unification, which was agreed upon in 1913. Reverend Dr. James Edgar Wilson proposed building a new church at the corner of Richhill and College streets in 1922 and the cornerstone was laid September 20, 1925.
When the disastrous Downey House fire struck three months later, at 3 a.m. on December 23, sparks, driven by a strong west wind blew across the courthouse square from Washington Street and reduced the church to ashes.
Brought together by circumstance, the two congregations would worship together at the Parish house of the Cumberland Presbytery on West High Street until the high columned Presbyterian Church you see today on Richhill Street was finished in 1927.