Traces of Wooster's German Legacy Today
A postcard featuring Christ's Church, today Trinity United Church of Christ. The Evangelical Christ's Church was once affiliated with the German Lutheran congregation, until it merged with the German Reformed Church in 1953.
In the interior lobby of the Trinity United Church of Christ stands the original facade of the church.
This is what the Trinity United Church of Christ, a congregation that merged the Evangelical Lutherans and English Reformed Church in 1953, looks like today.
Photo of the front of Salem Lutheran Church, one of the oldest German Lutheran congregations still standing in Wooster.
Plaque outside of the Salem Lutheran Church stating that the congregation was founded in 1828 by Reverend Weygandt.
Today, many of the Lutheran Churches in the greater Wooster area claim to trace their lineage to Reverend Sonnedecker's first joint Reformed and Lutheran congregation of 1819. One example is Salem Lutheran Church, the first solely Lutheran congregation in Wooster. It was founded 1827 by Reverend Sonnedecker’s Lutheran colleague at Die Freidens’ Kirche, Reverend G. H. Weygandt and other German settlers.1 Language barriers and feelings of nativism after a new wave of German immigration in the 1830s are possible reasons for the eventual division of the church into several smaller congregations.2 Jacob’s Lutheran Church, who broke off from Die Freidens’ Kirche in 1844, is another example of this separation.
Unlike Wooster’s Lutheran population, the German Reformed members did not splinter off into different congregations. What remained of the Reformed congreagtion (universally changed from German Reformed in 1869) and the (Lutheran) Christ Church merged in Wooster as early as 1953 to form the United Church of Christ.3 Wooster was ahead of the curve, as the United Churches of Christ was not founded out of a merger between the Reformed Church (changed from German Reformed in 1869) and the Evangelical and Reformed Church until four years later.4
1 Bonnie Knox and Larry Knox, Salem Lutheran Church Wayne County, Ohio, Cemetery.
2 Ben Douglass, History of Wayne County, Ohio (Indianapolis, IN: Robert Douglass,1878), 392-397.
3 Leo A. Keil, A History of The First Reformed Church, The First Evangelical and Reformed Church, The Trinity United Church of Christ, Wooster, Ohio (1993), 1.
4 Peter W. Williams, America’s Religions: From Their Origins to the Twenty-first Century, (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 127.