Zion Church of the City of Baltimore
The Zion Church of the City of Baltimore (German: Zionskirche the city of Baltimore ; and Zion Lutheran Church ) is a Lutheran church and congregation in Baltimore .
It is the oldest congregation in which services have been held in the same place in German without interruption in the USA since 1755 , even before the declaration of independence . It belongs to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America , a partner church of the Evangelical Church in Germany .
history
Church planting
German immigrants settled in Baltimore immediately after the city was founded. At first they held their services in what was then the only church in the city, the Anglican St. Paul's Church. In 1755 they founded the Evangelical Lutheran Congregation at Baltimore Town under the leadership of the doctor Charles Frederick Wiesenthal ; Johann Bager became the first pastor in the same year.
First church building
The congregation built their first church in 1762 on Fish Street, later renamed Saratoga, on the north side of the block of today's church. In 1785 an annex was added; that year she was also designated Zion Church for the first time on the Pennsylvania Ministry records . In 1795 the church received an organ from David Tannenberg. In 1804, at the time of its fourth pastor, Johann Daniel Kurtz (1763–1856), the congregation had 318 members, the simple church had become too small.
Second church building
On September 15, 1806, the church council decided to build a new building. Parishioners donated $ 12,559.60; the community bought a piece of land for $ 8,600. The new building was planned by the architects and community members George Rohrbach and Johannmachenheimer.
The foundation stone was laid in 1807 and the completed building was inaugurated on October 9, 1808. The brick church received entrances to Gay Street and on the south side of the church in the neo-Romanesque style ; the windows were made in neo-Gothic style. The low church tower on a square base was fitted with a simple bell.
On March 30, 1840, the church was badly damaged by a fire and was renovated in the same year while largely retaining the structure, but without the tower. The church was rededicated on November 8 of the same year.
The pulpit from 1840 has been preserved. In 1905 the brewery entrepreneur Frank Steil gave the church a baptismal font. In 1972 the church received a new altar, the retable of which with statues of the Archangel Michael and the knight Roland is a work of the German sculptor Hans Eckstein from 1930.
Construction work in 1912/1913
In 1912/1913 the parish hall was built by the architect Theodore Pietsch like the church from brick. The eagle hall of the parish hall is an excellent example of “ Arts and Crafts ” architecture with elements of Art Nouveau and is provided with stained glass windows on two sides , showing the coats of arms of 24 cities in the German-speaking cultural area as well as the city of Baltimore and the state of Maryland . In addition, the church received a new steeple. The three steel bells were cast by the Bochum Association in 1913 . They are copies of the bells in the dome of the German Pavilion at the 1904 Saint Louis World's Fair in St. Louis . Another new building was the pastorate , which was enlarged in 1922.
Since 1993 there has been a fragment of the Berlin Wall on the church wall , which the German-American radio presenter Rik DeLisle knocked out of the wall on November 11, 1989. It is dedicated to the memory of the people who crossed the border and those who lost their lives trying.
On December 30, 2011, the Zion Church was added to the National Register of Historic Places .
Library
The community's Hofman Memorial German Library goes back to the library of Julius Kayser Hofmann, who came from Friedberg (Hessen) and was pastor of the church from 1889 until his death in 1928. The smaller, particularly valuable part of his library, with a four-volume incunable Bible by Anton Koberger from Nuremberg from 1497 and a copy of the September Testament , the first edition of Martin Luther's translation of the New Testament from 1522, went to Johns Hopkins University . The library comprises around 15,000 volumes, mainly from the period between 1501 and 1920. The inventory includes a bible from Basel from 1701, which was given to the library in 1950 as a gift. The writings of the clergy are also collected. The first municipal constitution of June 17, 1769 is of particular importance for the history of the municipality.
language school
The German Language School was founded in 1929 to teach German to children after German disappeared from the Baltimore public school curriculum as a result of World War I. In the late 1950s, language classes for adults were also introduced. The number of adult pupils now exceeds the number of children. The school is a member of the German Language School Conference.
Pastors
Johann Daniel Kurtz (* 1763 in Germantown (Philadelphia) ) was one of the most important pastors of the congregation . Kurtz, the only pastor of the congregation born in the USA, was the first president of the Lutheran general synod from 1820 to 1823.
Pastor Heinrich Scheib founded the Scheib School in 1836, a progressive reform school whose bilingual school profile attracted not only children from Lutheran families of German origin but also those of the Catholic denomination and Jewish faith. Scheib worked in the community for 60 years.
From 2000 to January 2015, Holger Roggelin was pastor of the Zionskirche.
literature
- Julius Hofmann: A history of Zion Church of the city of Baltimore, 1755-1897: published in commemoration of its sesqui-centennial, October 15, 1905. CW Schneidereith & Sons, Baltimore 1905 ( digitized in the Google book search).
- Klaus Wust : Zion in Baltimore, 1755–1955; the bicentennial history of the earliest German-American church in Baltimore, Maryland. Zion Church of the City of Baltimore, Baltimore 1955.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Weekly List
- ↑ Johns Hopkins University Libraries (English)
Coordinates: 39 ° 17 ′ 29.9 ″ N , 76 ° 36 ′ 35.7 ″ W.