Mellon Church

In 1819 a Mrs. Barbara Negley of Pittsburgh erected there a tiny wooden edifice which was called the East Liberty Presbyterian Church. In 1848 her son-in-law Judge Thomas Mellon helped the same parish build a bigger wooden building, and in 1864 he contributed toward a two-story brick structure. In 1888 Judge Mellon had a share in the construction of the fourth East Liberty Presbyterian Church, a stone house of worship accommodating 1,600, which still exists.

President of its board of trustees is Judge Mellon's son, James R. Mellon. Pittsburgh banker. A famed absentee member is his brother. Secretary of the Treasury Andrew William Mellon. Most active of East Liberty's members is an-other brother, Richard Beatty Mellon, president of the Mellon National Bank of Pittsburgh.

Brother Richard earned the right to be called "most active" last week when he donated an unlimited sum, which his fellow parishioners estimated would amount perhaps to $3,000,000, for the purpose of razing the present East Liberty Church and building a fifth, vastly more impressive fane. Richard B. Mellon let it be known that he wished the projected church to have a longer life than its predecessors; he intended that it should be equipped with recreation rooms, athletic plants, cinema apparatus, every churchgoers' convenience which has ever been devised or thought of, so that even after a century its congregation will still be able to call the Mellon church "modern." But Brother Richard had no such advanced ideas about the architecture. He selected famed Architect Ralph Adams Cram of Boston, inveterate, pious, scholarly Gothicist, whose very name on a contract insures his clients of meticulous, medieval craftsmanship (Princeton University Chapel, Manhattan's Cathedral of St. John the Divine).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.