ROOTS & BRANCHES

If you know anything from reading “Roots & Branches,” you know how much I’ve relied on church records not only for my own genealogy but recommend them for use by others, especially in times before a particular area adopted civil registrations of birth, marriages and deaths.

The city of Reading, county seat of Berks County, gave a nod to this importance by scheduling a “Historic City Church Tour” a few weeks ago as part of Reading’s celebration of its 275^th anniversary.

The tour included 13 edifices, all of which are still being put to a religious use—although not always as houses of worship nor by the religious organization that originally constructed the buildings.

The buildings on the tour were all in the downtown area of Reading and many date to its industrial heyday of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Some of the reuses of the churches reflect Reading’s change from a town founded primarily by Germans, grown by people from the British Isles and eastern European countries, and today inhabited by a majority Hispanic population.

One of the stops on the tour that has changed the least was the Reading Monthly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (nicknamed the Quakers), who have had a small but significant presence in Berks County since its earliest settlement around 1718. The Quakers built several log structures before the current stone structure was raised in 1868.

Two German Lutheran churches were on the tour, reflecting that denomination’s historical prominence as the largest Protestant body in Berks.

The majestically spired Trinity Lutheran Church was built in 1791 for a congregation founded soon after the city in 1752.

St. John’s Lutheran, built 1863 in an Italianate style and remodeled in Romanesque style some decades later, was split off from Trinity by more recent immigrants who wanted services to continue in the German language when Trinity decided to use more English in the pulpit.

The opposite type of secessions happened among the German Reformed, who were the second largest Protestant denomination in Reading and Berks County. First Reformed Church, Trinity Lutheran’s counterpart as the earliest Reformed church in Reading, gave birth to Second Reformed and St. Paul’s Memorial Reformed, when First Reformed insisted on continuing German services in the mid-1800s.

Reflecting the demographic shifts of Reading, none of these churches are still Reformed (First is closed entirely), but two of them made the tour in their new incarnations: Charis Community Church (formerly St. Paul’s) and Baer Chapel (formerly Second).

Other fortresses of the Christian church on the tour included: the French Gothic revival structure of St. Peter the Apostle Roman Catholic Church, Christ Episcopal Church (Neo-Gothic), Holy Cross United Methodist (Romanesque revival, complete with gargoyles!), Christian Lighthouse Academy (another Gothic revival that previously was First Presbyterian Church), First Unitarian Universalist (a Romanesque revival), and First Baptist Church (another Romanesque revival).