Appalachian Churches Series – St. Michael Catholic Church of Frostburg
If you walk up Main Street in Frostburg and turn toward the rise at 44 East Main, the brick tower of St. Michael’s still holds its line over the business district and the coal town that grew up around it. The church, rectory, school building, convent, and plaza sit where Meshach and Catherine Frost once kept house, built an inn, and laid out the lots for a town that began as Mount Pleasant. Highland Hall, the Frost family home, stood on this knoll in 1812 and the graves of the town’s founders still rest in the churchyard, tying the parish grounds to the earliest non-Native history of the place.
For more than a century and a half, the life of the Catholic community in Frostburg has passed through this square. Coal miners and railroad men, German and Irish families, schoolchildren and sisters, funeral processions and wedding parties have all climbed the steps into St. Michael’s. The parish archives, preserved in microfilm reels and diocesan collections, read almost like a parallel census of Western Maryland’s coal country, a sacramental counterpoint to the ledgers of companies and the minutes of town meetings.
From Highland Hall to a Coalfield Parish
The story of the parish begins with the hill itself. Town founder Meshach Frost chose this site for Highland Hall, a substantial frame house that became both family home and inn on the National Road. When he and Catherine Frost began to divide and sell lots, the house looked down over a growing turnpike village. By the time coal seams in the surrounding hills brought companies and miners into the valley, the Frost homestead had already fixed this knoll as the center of town life.
Catholics in and around Frostburg were first served from St. Patrick’s Church at Mount Savage. According to the Maryland State Archives guide to the St. Michael’s Church Collection, priests from St. Patrick’s rode into what was then still often called Mount Pleasant to celebrate Mass in private homes. Around 1850 Father Michael Slattery became the first priest to take regular charge of the Frostburg congregation. He obtained the disused Highland Hotel in the middle of town and adapted it for worship, giving local Catholics a fixed place for Mass before there was any purpose-built church on the hill.
In 1852 the Archdiocese formally established St. Michael’s as the first Roman Catholic parish in Frostburg. The parish registers begin in that year and mark St. Michael’s emergence as a stable institution rather than a mission station served from elsewhere. A pastoral residence rose on the former hotel site and the parish began to purchase land not only for buildings but also for a cemetery that would serve the growing community.
Registers of a Coal Town
The baptismal, marriage, and burial registers of St. Michael’s are the core primary sources for the parish’s early history. Preserved today in the St. Michael’s Church Collection at the Maryland State Archives and on microfilm at the Maryland Center for History and Culture, they record decades of names from Frostburg and the surrounding mining camps.
Entries in the 1850s and 1860s show Irish and German surnames that match mine payrolls and census schedules. Godparents and witnesses reveal networks of kin and neighbors that connected Eckhart, Mount Savage, and the outlying company towns. In the early twentieth century, as coal companies recruited southern and eastern European labor, the registers begin to show Slavic, Italian, and other surnames entering the parish record.
Historians have leaned on these books to reconstruct Catholic life in Western Maryland. In a 1925 article on “Catholicity in Allegany and Garrett Counties” for the Records of the American Catholic Historical Society, O. B. Corrigan pointed to the Frostburg registers as evidence of pastoral visits and the growth of Catholic institutions in mining country.
The same sacramental books now serve genealogists who work from microfilm and digital scans. The Archdiocese of Baltimore has partnered with the Catholic Heritage Archive to make many of these sacramental entries accessible online, allowing descendants to trace baptisms and marriages back to the era when Frostburg coal fueled railroads and factories across the Mid-Atlantic.
A Gothic Brick Church on Main Street
The present brick church that dominates Main Street belongs to the years after the parish was formally organized. The Divine Mercy parish history explains that the cornerstone of St. Michael’s current building was laid on 2 August 1868 during the pastorate of Father Louis Morgan, the parish’s third pastor. The Very Reverend Edward Brennon of St. Patrick’s in Cumberland presided over the ceremony, tying the new structure on the Frost homestead hill to older Catholic centers down the valley.
Architectural surveys describe the building as a Gothic Revival church constructed of red brick. The Society of Architectural Historians’ Archipedia notes that St. Michael’s, its rectory of 1871, and the Ursuline Sisters’ convent of 1906 form a cohesive complex on the former Frost homestead site. The original steeple was a strikingly tall structure, rising around 175 feet above Main Street. Late nineteenth century views of Frostburg’s business district show the spire as one of the dominant features of the skyline.
The church interior was gradually embellished as the parish grew more secure. Later pastors oversaw renovations, stained glass, and the kind of mid-twentieth-century changes that many Catholic communities experienced after the Second Vatican Council. At some point during the twentieth century the original towering steeple was removed and replaced with the shorter tower that appears in photographs today, a change that altered the town’s silhouette but kept the brick nave and tower firmly rooted on the hill.
Cemeteries on the Hill
Like most nineteenth century parishes, St. Michael’s history cannot be told without its graves. The earliest burial ground associated with the parish lay behind the church, in the area where the parish hall later rose. The parish history notes that this first cemetery soon grew overcrowded, and that Father Valentine Schmitt, who took charge in the late nineteenth century, purchased land on McCulloh’s Hill for a larger burial ground. That hill is today Mount Pleasant Street, and the cemetery there took on the name St. Michael’s Cemetery or Mount Pleasant Cemetery.
The Maryland Civil War Burials compilation lists “St. Michael’s Cemetery / Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Frostburg,” indicating that the parish grounds became a resting place for veterans of the national conflict as well as for local miners and families. Newspaper obituaries from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries routinely describe funeral Masses at St. Michael’s followed by interment in the church cemetery, confirming that the hill above town was one of the principal burial places for the Catholic communities of Frostburg, Eckhart, and the neighboring camps.
Across the road from the Catholic ground lies the German Lutheran Cemetery, a small burial place established on land purchased from the McCulloh family for the German Lutheran congregation. GermanMarylanders.org notes that it sits “across the road from the larger St. Michael’s Catholic Cemetery,” a reminder that confessional lines in the nineteenth century sometimes ran along fence rails and lane ditches.
Prominent town figures share this hillside. Catherine Frost, who died in 1876, and her husband are buried in St. Michael’s Cemetery, so that the Frost family rests in the shadow of the church that took the place of their home and hotel. Over time, the cemetery became part of a broader landscape of memory that includes parishioners’ graves, veterans’ markers, and the stories of families who have cut grass, decorated stones, and searched the rows for long-missing ancestors.
Sisters, School, and Parish Hall
From the 1890s into the early twenty-first century, St. Michael’s was not only a place of worship but also a center of Catholic education. In 1891 Father Stephen J. Clarke invited the Ursuline Sisters to Frostburg and founded St. Michael’s School. The sisters staffed the classrooms in a brick school building that fronted Main Street behind the church. For generations of children from mining families, the school offered instruction framed by daily prayer and parish life.
An Archdiocese of Baltimore press release that announced the closure of St. Michael’s K–5 program in 2007 summarized this history, marking the end of more than a century of continuous Catholic schooling on the hill. The school building itself did not fall idle. A state housing and community development report from 2015 records a grant for the “rehabilitation of the historic St. Michael’s Catholic Church School building on Main Street for reuse as the Frostburg Museum,” an adaptive reuse that kept the structure at the center of cultural and historical storytelling in the city.
The parish hall, erected in 1912 according to a historical marker, provided another venue for community life. It hosted parish socials, plays, and meetings, and more recently its plaza has become the site of public art installations that speak to Frostburg’s endurance and heritage. In this way, the Catholic plant on Main Street blended worship, education, and civic gathering in a single complex that shaped daily life far beyond Sunday Mass.
St. Michael’s in Frostburg’s Historic Landscape
Because the parish sits on the site of Highland Hall and the Frost homestead, St. Michael’s is woven tightly into Frostburg’s official historic narrative. The National Register nomination for the Frostburg Historic District highlights the church complex as a key element in the architectural and historical character of Main Street, and the Maryland Historical Trust’s Medusa entry repeats that the Frost house once stood where the rectory now rises.
Local walking tour brochures describe 44 East Main Street as “currently home to St. Michael’s Church and Rectory and the Frostburg Museum,” and they invite visitors to view not only the buildings but also the Frost family graves and the Braddock Stone in the parish plaza. The church also serves as a reference point in other historical accounts, whether in a 1921 newspaper reminiscence that shows its old steeple on the skyline of a booming coal town, or in the Frostburg Fire Department’s history of the F2 tornado that crossed Main Street near the church in November 1891.
In planning documents, St. Michael’s appears again and again among the city’s historic resources. The Frostburg comprehensive plan lists the church as one of the significant buildings anchoring the downtown historic fabric, alongside St. Paul’s Lutheran and other long-standing congregations. That presence in both church and civic records illustrates how completely the parish has become part of the shared story of the town.
From St. Michael’s to Divine Mercy Parish
In the early twenty-first century, demographic and pastoral shifts led the Archdiocese of Baltimore to reorganize parishes across Western Maryland. On 1 January 2016, St. Michael in Frostburg, St. Ann in Grantsville, St. Joseph in Midland, and St. Peter in Westernport were united as Divine Mercy Parish. Father Edward Hendricks became the founding pastor, charged with weaving four communities into a single parish while preserving each church’s particular history and identity.
Under this new arrangement, St. Michael’s continues to function as an active worship site and as the administrative center of the combined parish. Funeral notices and obituaries from the last decade still direct mourners to Mass at St. Michael’s on Main Street with burial in the parish cemetery or in other local burial grounds. City announcements about parish hall parking and plaza improvements show a steady pattern of cooperation between the parish and municipal government, reinforcing the church complex’s role as a shared civic space.
The Divine Mercy Parish website continues to highlight the long arc of St. Michael’s history, from the days when Mass was held in an improvised chapel in the Highland Hotel through the building of the Gothic church, the opening and closing of the school, and the formation of the present multi-church parish.
An Anchor on Main Street
Taken together, the parish registers, cemetery records, architectural surveys, and local histories make St. Michael’s more than a landmark on Frostburg’s Main Street. They reveal a parish that grew up with the town itself, rooted first in the Frost family’s house and yard, then in a simple chapel, and finally in the brick church whose tower still marks the hill.
In the baptisms and marriages recorded in microfilmed sacramental books, one can hear the voices of miners, shopkeepers, and railroad workers who built their lives in the highlands of Western Maryland. In the rows of stones on McCulloh’s Hill and in the older graves behind the church, one can trace the hazards of coal work, the course of wars, and the steady faithfulness of families who chose to be buried within sight of the parish tower.
Today St. Michael’s stands as part of a larger parish and a designated historic district, but it remains what it has been since 1852: a Catholic anchor in a coal town, holding together memory, worship, and community on the old Frost homestead above Main Street.
Sources & Further Reading
Maryland State Archives. “St. Michael’s Church Collection, 1852–1984, Frostburg, Allegany County, Maryland.” MSA SC 2674. Maryland State Archives, Annapolis, MD. https://speccol.msa.maryland.gov/pages/speccol/collection.aspx?speccol=2674.
Maryland State Archives. Guide to Special Collections: Church Collections (Including St. Michael’s Church Collection, Frostburg). Maryland State Archives, Annapolis, MD. https://mdhistory.msa.maryland.gov/speccol/speccol.html.
Genealogical Society of Allegany County, Maryland. “St. Michael’s Church Collection 1851–1871 Baptismal Record [MSA M 3743] and St. Michael’s Church Records, Frostburg, MD.” Library catalog entry. https://www.acgsmd.org/libraryfiles.html.
Associated Archives at St. Mary’s Seminary and University. “Genealogy.” St. Mary’s Seminary and University Archives, Baltimore. https://stmarys.edu/archives/genealogy/.
Stanton, Thomas J. A Century of Growth: or, The History of the Church in Western Maryland, vol. 1. Baltimore: John Murphy Co., 1900. Digital edition, Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/ACenturyOfGrowthV1.
Corrigan, O. B. “Catholicity in Allegany and Garrett Counties, Maryland.” Records of the American Catholic Historical Society 36, no. 2 (June 1925): 113–154. Accessed via JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44208628.
Maryland State Archives. Maryland Civil War Burials. MSA SC 6197. Includes entry for “St. Michael’s Cemetery / Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Frostburg.” PDF inventory. https://msa.maryland.gov/megafile/msa/speccol/sc6100/sc6197/000000/000001/000000/000005/pdf/mdsa_sc6197_1_5.pdf.
German Marylanders. “German Lutheran Cemetery, Frostburg.” GermanMarylanders.org. https://www.germanmarylanders.org/cemeteries/german-lutheran-cemetery-frostburg.
German Marylanders. “St. Paul’s German Lutheran Church – Frostburg.” GermanMarylanders.org. https://www.germanmarylanders.org/churches/st-paul-s-german-lutheran–frostburg.
Divine Mercy Parish. “St. Michael, Frostburg.” Divine Mercy Parish, Frostburg, Maryland. https://divinemercymd.org/ (navigate via “Our Churches” to St. Michael, Frostburg).
“Four Western Maryland Churches Unite to Form Divine Mercy Parish.” Catholic Review (Archdiocese of Baltimore), January 2016. https://catholicreview.org/four-western-maryland-churches-unite-to-form-divine-mercy-parish/.
Matysek, George P. Jr. “Father Edward Hendricks, Trailblazer in Pastoral Planning, Will Remain in Western Maryland for Retirement.” Catholic Review, June 28, 2023. https://catholicreview.org/father-edward-hendricks-trailblazer-in-pastoral-planning-will-remain-in-western-maryland-for-retirement/.
Maryland Historical Trust. National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: Frostburg Historic District (AL-VIII-A-043). 1983. PDF nomination file. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/13a455a2-8b31-4180-b52f-c1fcb413827a.
Maryland Historical Trust. “Frostburg Historic District (AL-VIII-A-043).” Medusa: Maryland Historical Trust Online Maryland Inventory of Historic Properties. https://apps.mht.maryland.gov/medusa/PDF/NR_PDFs/NR-758.pdf.
Maryland Historical Trust. “AL-VII-A-043-1 St. Michael’s Parish Hall.” Medusa PDF inventory form, 2015. https://apps.mht.maryland.gov/Medusa/PDF/Allegany/AL-VII-A-043-1.pdf.
Davidson, Lisa Pfueller, and Catherine C. Lavoie. “Main Street Buildings, Frostburg, Maryland.” SAH Archipedia, Society of Architectural Historians and University of Virginia Press. http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/MD-01-WM55.
Allegany County / Frostburg Museum. Historic Walking Tour of Frostburg. Walking-tour brochure PDF, updated 2022. https://assets.simpleviewinc.com/simpleview/image/upload/v1/clients/alleganymd/frostburg_historicwalkingtour_web_20220921_0619678c-752f-43d2-a99f-80f506e78795.pdf.
City of Frostburg. New Business Welcome Packet (includes summary of Frostburg Historic District and key institutions such as St. Michael Catholic Church). City of Frostburg, Community Development Department, 2024. https://www.frostburgcity.org/sites/default/files/fileattachments/community_development/page/2504/new_business_welcome_packet.update08.01.24.pdf.
“Frostburg.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Entry noting Highland Hall and the Frost family in relation to the present site of St. Michael’s Church and Rectory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frostburg,_Maryland.
“List of Churches in the Archdiocese of Baltimore.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Includes entry for St. Michael Church, 44 E. Main St., Frostburg, now part of Divine Mercy Parish. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_churches_in_the_Archdiocese_of_Baltimore.
Western Maryland Regional Library (WHILBR). “Catherine Frost, 1792–1876.” Allegany County Women’s History – Pioneering Women. https://www.whilbr.org/AlleganyWomen/Catherine-Frost-1792-1876.
Western Maryland Regional Library (WHILBR). “Fayette Mitchell and the Founders of Frostburg.” Allegany County African American History. https://www.whilbr.org/AlleganyAfricanAmericans/Fayette-Mitchell-and-Founders-of-Frostburg.
Stanton, Thomas J. A Century of Growth, or The History of the Church in Western Maryland [2 vols.]. Reprint edition description. Heritage Books. https://heritagebooks.com/products/101-s2128.
Durst Funeral Home. “Anna Dishong Obituary, February 19, 2018.” Obituary noting funeral and interment at St. Michael’s, Frostburg. https://www.durstfuneralhome.com/obituaries/anna-dishong.
Durst Funeral Home. “Rosalie Arnone Obituary, February 7, 2025.” Obituary noting membership in Divine Mercy Parish, St. Michael’s, Frostburg, and burial in St. Michael’s Cemetery. https://www.durstfuneralhome.com/obituaries/rosalie-arnone.
Author Note: As an Appalachian historian and digital storyteller, I wanted to trace how one hilltop parish became an anchor for a coal town. I hope this piece helps you see Frostburg’s Catholic churchyard as part of a much larger story about faith, work, and memory in the Alleghenies.