CHURCHES

Church of the Good Shepherd at the corner of Charles & William Streets, 1907. CLICK LEFT PHOTO TO SEE POSTCARD VERSION

The Church of the Good Shepherd in 2021.
(Photo courtesy of Dan Kemper.)

				Trinity Episcopal Church at 430 Juliana Street was established In 1843 after several English families moved into Parkersburg. (The Episcopal Church had originally been the Church of England until members broke away during the Revolutionary War.) The cornerstone for the first church, called Trinity Parish, was laid July 11, 1846, and took three years to complete..The body of the church's founding rector, Reverend Thomas Smith, who died in 1847, was buried under the church's outside steps. This church was torn down in 1878 and replaced by the current sandstone Gothic church (completed on May 4, 1879) without disturbing his remains. An adjoining Sunday school building, called Trinity Hall, was built two years later, and is still used today for Trinity's annual fundraising book sales.
St. Paul's Methodist Church at Eleventh & Market, 1907.

St. Margaret Mary Catholic Church in the 2500 block of Dudley Avenue.

The first Methodist services occurred in Parkersburg area in 1799, but a church wasn't built until 1815, on Avery Street between Third and Fourth streets. Twenty years later the congregation built a new church at the corner of Fifth and Market. In 1844, when the question of slavery split the Methodists into Northern and Southern branches, Northerners moved out of the church at Fifth and Market and met in homes until they constructed a small, frame church on Fifth Street in 1846. They built another church in its place in 1862, but it burned down eleven years later. (Meanwhile, the Southern church eventually became St. Paul's at Eleventh and Market.) The next Northern church was built in 1874 on the corner of Fifth and Juliana and became known as "Old First Church" (left). It was damaged in a 1895 Little Kanawha River boat explosion near the Juliana Street Bridge. In 1911 the congregation moved up Juliana from Fifth to its current Gothic building on Tenth Street (below).

The First Methodist Church was built at the corner of Tenth and Juliana from 1909 to 1910 and opened the following year, replacing the Methodist Church at Fifth and Juliana. For more photos see the JULIANA ST. page. (Photo and handbill courtesy of Kasey Snyder)

Bethany Methodist Church at the corner of Lynn & Wood Streets, in 1907.

St. John's Evangelical Lutheran Church at Ninth & Avery, in 1907. It was destroyed by the 1909 Quincy Street Tank Disaster, but a wall still stands as part of a later building.

First Lutheran Church at 1701 Nineteenth Street around 1939. The city's original Lutheran church was founded in 1893 as St. John's Lutheran on Avery, near Ninth, but it was destroyed by the Quincy Hill Water Tank Disaster in 1909. This building was dedicated in 1927.

First United Brethren Church on the corner of Sixteenth Street and St. Mary's Avenue, in 1907. This church has been changed considerably.		First United Brethren Church in 1918.

Calvary Baptist Church at Thirteenth & Avery Streets, in 1907.		St. Mary's Avenue Christian Church at the corner of Fourteenth St. & St. Mary's Avenue, in 1907. The building was later converted into apartments. It was torn down in the early 1990s.

Looking north in 1907 toward Elberon Methodist Church at Nineteenth & St. Mary's Avenue. Built in 1893, it was moved in 1908 to Liberty Street and became the Stephenson Memorial Church.		St. Andrew's Methodist Church was built in 1908 to replace the old Elberon Methodist Church.

Looking north up St. Mary's Avenue at St. Andrew's
Methodist Church, at the corner of 19th Street.

The First Presbyterian Church at Tenth and Market around 1920. For earlier photos of this church, see UPPER MARKET STREET.

The First Baptist Church on the southwest corner of Ninth and Market was built between 1871 and 1879. Its earlier location was the southwest corner of Sixth and Ann, where another church, Logan Memorial United Methodist, now stands.

Built in 1870, St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church on Market Street is Parkersburg's oldest active church building. Other photos are available on ST. XAVIER CATHOLIC CHURCH

The interior of St. Francis Xavier in 1907.

Looking west toward the Henry Logan Methodist Church on the southwest
corner of Ann Street and Sixth, sometime in the 1950s. It was a black
church, founded in 1866. This building was built in 1891.

The Life Gospel Tabernacle, seen here in 1944, was located on Division Street in
South Parkersburg. (The building is still standing.) Reverend Edmond Life was
the pastor throughout most of the 1940s. He later toured around the eastern
U.S. as an evangelist before settling in Meigs County, Ohio.
(Courtesy of David Zumbach)

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