Allentown's Episcopal Church of the Mediator to celebrate its 100th re-birthday in 2012

From Bethlehem-

Some institutions have 100th birthdays, 200th birthdays and even 250th birthdays. But Allentown’s Episcopal Church of the Mediator at West Park and Turner Street is one of those few organizations that next year will be celebrating its100th re-birthday.

Founded in the late 1860s in the city’s industrial Sixth Ward, Mediator went into a state of dormancy from 1880 to 1911. Re-opening at its current location in 1912 the revived church once more became an active part of the city’s religious and social life. Among many other things, it was where the city’s first Boy Scout Troop, partially funded by General Harry C. Trexler, was formed in 1914.

Episcopalians have been few and far between in the religious landscape of the Lehigh Valley. Easton boasted Trinity Episcopal Church, the denomination’s mother church in the region in the early 1800s. In the 1840s St Mark’s Episcopal Church was founded in Mauch Chunk, now Jim Thorpe, by members of the Sayre family. It’s best known congregant was Lehigh Valley Railroad founder Asa Packer, who is said to have been rejected for membership by the Presbyterians when he refused to sign a temperance pledge to abstain from drinking alcoholic beverages.

More here-

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