Appalachian Churches Series – St. Paul’s Lutheran Church of Frostburg
At the top of West Main Street, on the rise where traffic on the old highway begins to thin out, St. Paul’s Lutheran Church has watched a mountain town grow up around it. Long before the storefronts of downtown took shape, before coal and coke defined the valley, Lutheran families were gathering here for worship. Today the congregation describes itself as the oldest church in Frostburg, with first services held in 1808, predating both the town and the building of the National Road in 1819.
Pioneer Lutherans before the town
The story of St. Paul’s begins in a landscape that was still more road and clearing than city. By the early nineteenth century a small group of Lutherans was meeting at what local memory called the Old Neff Meeting House, a simple structure that served as both gathering place and worship space on the ridge that would become the heart of Frostburg. Denominational historians link the formal organization of the Frostburg congregation to the work of the Rev. John George Butler, who in 1812 gathered these families into a recognized English Lutheran church.
At that point there was no incorporated town and no National Road, only a rough route that would soon be improved into the great federal highway across the Appalachians. Pastors from St. Paul’s in Cumberland treated Frostburg as part of a wider “charge,” riding out from the county seat and preaching along the developing turnpike, often with weeks between services. The Frostburg Lutherans worshiped in borrowed spaces, first at Old Neff’s Meeting House and later in a log schoolhouse on the National Road, clinging stubbornly to a regular pattern of Word and sacrament even as the town itself remained more a promise than a settled place.
From circuit stop to independent congregation
As traffic increased on the new National Road and coal opened up the surrounding ridges, Frostburg shifted from a rural stopping place into a true mountain town. In the 1830s and 1840s the Lutheran work here changed with it. Under the Rev. John Kehler the congregation moved its regular worship from the old Neff building into a log schoolhouse, a small but telling sign that Frostburg was beginning to claim a life of its own rather than functioning only as an outpost of Cumberland.
The decisive step came during the pastorate of the Rev. Jesse Winecoff in the early 1840s, when Frostburg separated from the Cumberland charge. German Marylanders’ summary of the congregation’s history, drawn from early synodical and county histories, notes that it was “around this time, 1843, that the English Lutheran Church of Frostburg really began to grow” and that the parish built what contemporaries called a “state of the art” church building for its growing English-speaking membership. The Frostburg church remained proud of its connection to St. Paul’s in Cumberland, but it was no longer simply a satellite. It had become what later writers would call “the pioneer church organization in Frostburg,” the first permanent congregation in a town that was still being surveyed, platted, and paved.
Claiming a place on West Main Street
By mid century the Lutherans were ready for a more substantial home. Under the Rev. Frederick Benedict a new church was planned on West Main Street. The cornerstone was laid in 1860, only to have construction delayed by the Civil War, a reminder that the congregation’s life was tied to national events as well as local ones. When the building was finally completed, St. Paul’s stood among the emerging brick and frame structures of a county-seat mining town that was learning to think of itself as permanent.
The GermanMarylanders account, which draws heavily on earlier synod histories, emphasizes how quickly the new church became a center of congregational life. Under the Rev. Henry Bishop in the late 1860s, the people of St. Paul’s introduced a more formal liturgy, organized a choir, established a Sunday school library, and created a primary department for the youngest children. In a town that still relied on the rhythms of the mines and the railroad, the church offered a different kind of structure, one shaped by hymn tunes, catechism lessons, and the steady turn of the liturgical year.
Fire, rebuilding, and the red brick Romanesque church
The building that most people in Frostburg recognize today, with its red brick walls and Romanesque Revival lines, dates to the 1870s. The city’s historic walking tour brochure describes St. Paul’s at 34 West Main Street as a gable-front Romanesque Revival church, constructed in 1872 along with its parsonage, overlooking the business district from the west.
Disaster followed quickly. Within a few years a fire swept through the downtown business district. The walking tour notes that the church and parsonage helped hold the flames back from climbing farther up the hill, but they suffered such severe damage that the sanctuary had to be rebuilt. Denominational histories speak of a devastating blaze in September of the mid 1870s that destroyed the church and a large portion of the immediate neighborhood, sparing only the parsonage. The congregation went back to work almost immediately, worshiping in the basement level while a new sanctuary rose on the same site.
Telling the story a century later, the congregation’s own brief history folds these events into a concise summary: the 1872 church burned along with downtown in a late 1870s fire and was rebuilt on the same site, with a major addition added in the 1950s. Whether the fire is dated to 1874 or slightly later, the point is clear. St. Paul’s did not leave its place on West Main. The congregation rebuilt where it had been planted, so that the church’s present red brick walls still rest upon the commitments of an earlier generation that refused to let fire drive them out of the center of town.
A downtown church among many steeples
By 1900 Frostburg’s Main Street had filled out with banks, opera houses, saloons, and storefront businesses. A local civic history, written for the Downtown Frostburg association, describes a town of roughly 5,300 people with both gas and electric plants, two opera houses, three banks, and “numerous churches and saloons.” In that setting, St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, Frostburg United Methodist Church, and St. Michael’s Catholic Church are singled out as three congregations whose buildings still stand in the central business district more than a century later.
That continuity matters. The later City of Frostburg Comprehensive Plan, in its inventory of historic resources, lists “St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, 34 West Main Street” among the town’s significant historic religious properties. Local histories and tourism materials repeat the same picture. St. Paul’s is not a quaint structure tucked away on a side street. It sits directly on the main commercial artery, just across from the post office, where its brick facade and tower form part of the visual language of downtown itself.
German-speaking neighbors and the language of worship
The Lutherans of Frostburg were never a single, monolithic group. In the same period that St. Paul’s was growing as an English-speaking congregation tied to the Maryland Synod, a separate German Lutheran community took shape on the east side of town. GermanMarylanders’ entry on the German Lutheran Church in Frostburg explains that an Evangelical German Lutheran congregation organized in 1860 under the Rev. Mr. Steagle, meeting first in an old schoolhouse, then in the Presbyterian building, and finally in its own sanctuary built in 1872. That church later became associated with what is now Zion United Church of Christ on East Main Street.
Local memory, preserved in community history conversations, remembers Zion on East Main as the German-speaking Lutheran congregation in the nineteenth century, while St. Paul’s on West Main emerged as the primary English-language Lutheran presence. In practical terms, this meant that one group of Frostburg Lutherans worshiped, learned, and buried their dead in German, while another came to hear Scripture and hymnody in English. Together they mirror the broader story of the region, where first generation immigrants held tight to the language of the old country and their children and grandchildren gravitated toward English-speaking churches that still carried German surnames on their rolls.
Renovation, memorials, and a “pioneer church” in the twentieth century
By the turn of the twentieth century, St. Paul’s had already lived through multiple buildings, a major fire, and the transition from mission outpost to downtown institution. The congregation did not stand still. GermanMarylanders’ narrative, drawing on synodical records, describes substantial improvements under pastors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Under the Rev. C. A. Britt in the 1890s the congregation renovated the auditorium and Sunday school rooms, added frescoing and new interior paint, installed carpeting and steam heat, and organized a wide range of mission societies, including a Woman’s Home and Foreign Missionary Society and youth mission groups.
Those efforts continued into the pastorate of the Rev. H. H. Beidleman beginning in 1915. According to the same account, the church invested in a new pulpit, lectern, altar, baptismal font, memorial windows, art glass doors, modern indirect lighting, a pipe organ, and further renovations to the Sunday school rooms and exterior. By the end of this program the congregation had spent more than eleven thousand dollars, a significant sum for a small mountain town, in order to make what synod leaders praised as one of the most beautiful and well equipped places of worship in the region.
The people of St. Paul’s also positioned themselves within a wider Lutheran story. A bronze tablet honoring the missionary “Father” C. F. Heyer was unveiled in 1917, linking the congregation’s local identity to a figure revered across Maryland Lutheran circles. During the First World War, the pastor served as a camp chaplain, while two dozen members of the congregation entered military service. Those experiences tied the Frostburg church to the upheavals of the early twentieth century even as its building projects signaled confidence in a future on West Main Street.
A congregation preserved in records and in print
One reason St. Paul’s matters in Allegany County is that its registers and minutes preserve a two hundred year record of baptisms, marriages, funerals, and congregational decisions. The church’s own history and the long continuity of its location suggest that those records remain in the offices at 34 West Main Street, covering nearly the whole span of Frostburg’s existence as a town.
Over the last several decades local genealogists and historians have worked to make some of that material more accessible. The Genealogical Society of Allegany County’s journal, The Old Pike Post, includes an article titled “Frostburg’s St. Paul’s Lutheran Church Records” by Dick Koch in volume 24, issue 4, a sign that at least portions of the registers have been transcribed and analyzed in print. Another series in the same journal publishes Lutheran burial records from St. Paul’s, giving researchers a way to connect family stories to specific dates and grave markers. Frostburg State University’s genealogy research guide points to a separate volume, Lutheran Church Records, 1801–1921: From Allegany Co., held in special collections in Cumberland, which assembles Lutheran and family Bible records from across the county, likely including entries from Frostburg.
Modern congregational histories have also taken up the story. In 2002, longtime member and local historian Mary Elizabeth “Betty” VanNewkirk published In the Heart of Frostburg: Saint Paul’s Lutheran Church, a book-length narrative of the congregation and its pastors. Her obituary notes that she served in the choir, taught Sunday school, curated the Frostburg Museum, and wrote a weekly local history column before turning that experience into three books, one of them devoted to St. Paul’s and its role in the city’s life. Her work, built on church records, oral histories, and civic archives, offers one of the fullest portraits of how a single congregation helped to shape a mountain town.
St. Paul’s in the Frostburg of today
In the present, St. Paul’s describes itself in simple terms. Its brief history page notes that it is the oldest church in Frostburg, with first services in 1808, that its 1872 church burned in the great downtown fire of the 1870s, and that it was rebuilt on the same site before receiving a major addition in the mid twentieth century. The congregation now belongs to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, is part of the Delaware–Maryland Synod, and participates in the global Lutheran World Federation.
The ministry that takes place inside the red brick walls is recognizably small town and thoroughly contemporary. Church communications describe weekly prayer and Bible study gatherings, Sunday soup socials, and an annual picnic that brings members together for worship and a shared meal, the kind of events that knit a congregation into the fabric of local life. The sanctuary’s stained glass and carved wood make visible the gifts of earlier generations, while the people who gather there now carry forward practices first begun in a log schoolhouse over two centuries ago.
From Old Neff’s Meeting House to a fire scarred but rebuilt Romanesque sanctuary, from circuit riding pastors to a settled roster of ministers rooted in the community, St. Paul’s Lutheran Church tells a story about persistence in place. It is the story of Lutheran families who worshiped here before there was a town, of laborers and miners who walked up Main Street to baptize their children and bury their dead, and of a congregation that chose again and again to rebuild, renovate, and remain. In the long view of Appalachian history, St. Paul’s stands not just as a building of red brick and stained glass, but as one of the institutions that helped turn a crossroads on the mountain into a lasting community.
Sources & Further Reading
St. Paul’s Lutheran Church. “About St. Paul’s Lutheran.” St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, Frostburg, Maryland. Accessed February 19, 2026. https://www.stpaulsfrostburg.org/about-us.html
Downtown Frostburg Main Street Program. “History of Frostburg.” DowntownFrostburg.com. Accessed February 19, 2026. https://www.downtownfrostburg.com/history/
Frostburg Historic Walking Tour. Historic Frostburg Walking Tour brochure. Frostburg, MD: City of Frostburg and Allegany County Tourism, n.d. PDF, accessed February 19, 2026. https://www.frostburgcity.org/sites/default/files/fileattachments/planning_commission/page/2326/historic_walking_tour.pdf
City of Frostburg. Comprehensive Plan. Frostburg, MD: City of Frostburg, 1990–1991. PDF, accessed February 19, 2026. https://www.frostburgcity.org/sites/default/files/fileattachments/community_development/page/2332/finalcomprehensiveplanonline.pdf
GermanMarylanders.org. “St. Paul’s Lutheran – Frostburg.” GermanMarylanders, n.d. Accessed February 19, 2026. http://www.germanmarylanders.org/churches/st-pauls-lutheran-frostburg
GermanMarylanders.org. “German Lutheran Church, Frostburg, MD Cemetery.” GermanMarylanders, n.d. Accessed February 19, 2026. http://www.germanmarylanders.org/churches/german-lutheran-church-frostburg-md-cemetery
VanNewkirk, Mary Elizabeth. In the Heart of Frostburg: Saint Paul’s Lutheran Church. [Cumberland, MD]: [St. Paul’s Lutheran Church], 2002. Listing accessed February 19, 2026. https://www.wonderbk.com/shop/author/betty-vannewkirk
“Mary E. ‘Betty’ VanNewkirk.” Obituary. Cumberland Times-News, April 1, 2016. Accessed February 19, 2026. https://obituaries.times-news.com/obituary/mary-vannewkirk-760354731
Wentz, Abdel Ross. History of the Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Maryland of the United Lutheran Church in America, 1820-1920. Harrisburg: Evangelical Press, 1920. Digitized edition, Internet Archive, accessed February 19, 2026. https://archive.org/details/historyofevang00went
Bowersox, Hixon Tracey. History of St. Paul’s English Lutheran Church of Cumberland Maryland, 1794-1944. Cumberland, MD: Monarch Printing Company, 1944. WorldCat and Internet Archive listings accessed February 19, 2026. https://archive.org/download/historyofstpauls00bowe/historyofstpauls00bowe.pdf
“Lutheran Church Records, 1801-1921: From Allegany Co. Cumberland, MD, and Family Bible Records.” Special Collections BX8042.C8L9, Frostburg State University Library. Listed in “Records – Genealogy Research Guide.” Accessed February 19, 2026. https://libguides.frostburg.edu/c.php?g=432638&p=2952817
“Allegany County MD Church Records.” LDSGenealogy. Accessed February 19, 2026. https://ldsgenealogy.com/MD/Allegany-County-Church-Records.htm
Marks, Kenneth R. “Free Maryland Online Church Records.” The Ancestor Hunt, April 22, 2024. Accessed February 19, 2026. https://theancestorhunt.com/blog/free-maryland-online-church-records/
Allegany College of Maryland Library. “Appalachian Collection.” Allegany College of Maryland. Accessed February 19, 2026. https://library.allegany.edu/polaris/custom/allegany/content/appalachian_coll.aspx
Genealogical Society of Allegany County, Maryland. “Research Available.” GSACMD.org. Accessed February 19, 2026. https://gsacmd.org/research/
“Old Pike Post Index Sorted by Volume/Issue through 42-1 – March 2025.” Genealogical Society of Allegany County, Maryland, March 1, 2025. PDF, accessed February 19, 2026. https://gsacmd.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Index-for-the-Old-Pike-Post-Sorted-by-Volume-thru-March-2025.pdf
Stegmaier, Harry I., Jr., David M. Dean, Gordon E. Kershaw, and John B. Wiseman. Allegany County: A History. Parsons, WV: McClain Printing Company, 1976. Listings and reviews accessed February 19, 2026. https://www.wonderbk.com/shop/collectors-corner/book/7074710
Robertson, Tom. Images of America: Frostburg. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2002. Cited in Downtown Frostburg history page; listings accessed February 19, 2026. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1506253.Images_of_America
Cumberland Times-News and Marge Uphold, comps. Allegany County: Pictorial History. Cumberland, MD: Cumberland Times-News, n.d. Listings accessed February 19, 2026. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00173BGR0
Schwartz, Lee G. Allegany County: A Pictorial History. Norfolk, VA: Donning Company, 1980. Listings accessed February 19, 2026. https://www.abebooks.co.uk/signed-first-edition/Allegany-County-pictorial-history-Schwartz-Lee/31207982979/bd
City of Frostburg. “Local Attractions.” Frostburg, MD, n.d. Includes Frostburg Museum and Main Street historic resources. Accessed February 19, 2026. https://www.frostburgcity.org/visitors/page/local-attractions
Author Note: Writing about St. Paul’s Lutheran Church means paying attention to how one downtown congregation can anchor an entire mountain town’s story. I hope this piece helps you see Frostburg’s oldest church as both a resource for family history and a landmark in the broader history of Appalachian Maryland.