Celebrating Lansford’s Welsh Church

To celebrate National Historic Preservation Month this year, we will highlight the two 2024 Community Initiative Award winners with their own blog posts. In this week’s post, I asked Bruce Markovich with the Lansford Historical Society in Lansford, Carbon County about their work preserving the Welsh Church, which will celebrate its 175th anniversary this year.

Can you tell us a little bit about the Lansford Historical Society and the Lansford community?

The LHS started in 1996 with the purchase of the former Methodist Church at 117 East Bertsch Street. The first goal of the society was to establish the Panther Valley Public Library and the society raised $140,000 to convert the first floor of the church into the Library. The Library opened in year 2000 and has been opened ever since. The society covers all costs associated with the library except for heat and electric.

The society then turned its attention to developing a museum in the upstairs portion of the former church. After renovations to the museum space were completed in 2004, the museum only needed to remove two pews to accommodate our artifacts at that time. Now the museum is packed with display cases along with two overflow rooms and we have artifacts covering all aspects of the borough from our start as a small settlement in 1832 to present. Visitors describe our museum as the best kept secret in the county and are always impressed with our displays. Each year we do various dedicated displays, including Military for May 30^th, Vintage Christmas, our hugely successful Map Show and others. Each year we set up displays at all our local community events.

I’ve learned a bit about Lansford’s roots as a coal mining town and the story of the historic Welsh Church – such an interesting history! Can you tell us more about it?

The Lansford Welsh Church was built in 1849 and dedicated on Christmas Day in 1850. The church is the oldest original church in Carbon County and one of the oldest original Welsh Churches in Pennsylvania.

From 1850 until 1872, the building served as the only church in the Panther Valley being utilized by all religions in the valley. Regular services were held in the church from 1850 until 1934 and then it was used for special occasions until 1985. In addition to that:

• the church served as the first school in the valley until 1892,
• in the 1870s, the Molly Maguires murdered two of the Welsh mine bosses who were members of the church,
• in 1902, the church was used as headquarters for the Easton Grays from the Pennsylvania State Militia when martial law was declared during the great coal strike of 1902,
• in 1918, the church was used as hospital during the 1918 flu pandemic.

In 2018, LHS purchased the church after learning that it was slated for imminent demolition. Why is the church important to the Lansford community that LHS mobilized quickly for its preservation?

I think the church is a reminder of the hardiness and dedication of the earliest settlers in the area.  These early miners – if they survived the conditions of the early mines – were still faced with hunger and in many cases, discrimination based upon their heritage. Even with all they faced, they never lost faith in their religions and the need to celebrate their faith.

I often thought if the church was a person just what that person had witnessed in history… the civil war, Lincoln, Molly Maguires, electricity, telephone, automobiles two world wars and a few others in between, plague a unknown number of funerals, weddings. What did congregation pray for ? Who is buried in the area around the church, but most of all I ask myself why did this building survive this long?

In the 1970’s the building sat, missing most of the roof on the west side, rain and snow filled the interior for years. During the fire of 2015, the church should have burned down but yet it still stands. Any building that had survived 175 years deserves  a better end than to be smashed into pieces and hauled off to the dump.

LHS has been working since 2018 to stabilize and preserve the church. What condition was it in when you started? What kind of repairs have been made to date and what do you still need to do?

When we acquired the church, you entered through the front door into foyer, with a door on each side into the sanctuary. The men and women sat apart from each other during the service and the women went through the door on the right the men on the left.

Because of the 2015 fire, the walls of the foyer were completely burned, a chimney stood in the center of the foyer, the floor had a 10 foot by 16 foot hole burned in it, and the floor joists were burned through. Due to a poor renovation in 1985, water running down the sides of the church was leaking into the area between the top of the foundation wall and the rim beam. The beam was missing in most areas and the east wall of the church was bowed out and leaning about fifteen degrees out of plum. We needed to address that right away.

When I was growing up in town, my father was a very successful contractor here and growing up, I personally worked nearly every house in town.  After a few years as a cook and then a police chief, I joined my brother’s company and ran large industrial construction projects. Based upon all this experience the issues with the church did not worry me.

We first removed what remained of the windows in the church, so they would not be damaged in the lift.  We then put planks across the window openings with eye hooks and cables to tie the two walls together, we then ran cables diagonally from the floor to the roof to keep the roof from sliding off if the wooden pegs holding the roof to walls broke. We removed siding from the outside wall, screwed sheets of plywood to the walls to give it some strength, attached beams to the plywood, placed hydraulic jacks under the beams and lifted the entire east side of the building all at once. We lifted the east side of the building about a foot, we then attached a come along at the center of the bow and pulled the wall back into place.

It was two months of prep time and the actual lift was over in ten minutes. We replaced the sill log with a pressure treated beam (my only concession to modern materials) and lowered the church back down on top of the new beam. I replaced the burned floor joists using some wood from a 1865 barn and fabricated the vast majority of the floor boards on site.

Though I planned on doing the roof replacement, once we went up on the roof we found that over half of the original roof wood had rotted and most of the rear roof joists and rotted at the walls because of the years of the missing roof.  After this evaluation, it was felt that we needed a professional contractor with enough manpower and skill to repair the roof.  We hired Frances Hutta, who I went to high school with,  and he travels the country replacing church roofs. Hutta restructured the entire roof, along with the some of the large wooden beams that hold the church together. He did excellent work but at a costs of $30,000.00, which depleted our church account.

We still need to a few things. We need to repair the windows that were broken by the fireman to fight the fire in 2015, which is estimated at $9,000. We  have a grant for a new ceiling, which is scheduled for June, and we need to paint the inside and outside.

The society has expended great expense to salvage and restore the original 1850 candle chandelier. In addition to the repairs, the society has undertaken the steps to preserve the original church records and prayer books dating to 1850. These records contain the history of the valley including information on the infamous Mollie Maguires.

What are LHS’ plans for the Welsh Church?

Future plans are to complete the church for use as a lecture site while displaying the history of the church. We would like to then replicate a version of the miners home circa 1870 adjacent to the church.  Our plan was to move the oldest home in town to use on the site but it had termites and carpenter ants and we could not risk a cross infestation.

We know there are dozens and dozens of groups like LHS across the Commonwealth that are working to preserve an important local place. What advice can you give to others in a similar situation?

My advice to others is always keep a vision of the end result in your mind, and be prepared for setbacks. Anytime you run into a unanticipated problem, keep in mind your fixing it contributes to the overall positive conclusion of the project.

Are there other organizations, people, or companies you’d like to acknowledge for their contributions to this project and its success?

I would like to thank all the people that donated money towards the cost of the restoration. It’s the $10.00 and $20.00 dollar donations that are continuous and add up.

 

Editor’s Note: Check out the Lansford Historical Society’s Facebook page for more information about this all-volunteer group, the Welsh Church project, and their other work. You can also check this news coverage of their work from 2018 and 2023.

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