St. Michael’s Evangelical Lutheran congregation, located at Pine Hill, Brother’s Valley township, has always been a part of the Berlin charge. The earliest record we have of this congregation is a book containing names of communicants, beginning with the year 1790. The first list of names numbers sixty. This number of communicants justifies us in believing that the congregation was organized some years previous to 1790. It seems this congregation did not have a church edifice before the year 1798, and that up to this time they worshiped in a schoolhouse which stood near where St. Michael’s church now stands. From an old deed we learn that the old graveyard at Pine Hill, containing one acre of ground, was purchased by Michael Keefer and Michael Miller (in trust) for the Lutheran congregation, of Nicholas Coleman, for the sum of twenty shillings. It is generally supposed that during 1798 the first Lutheran church was erected at Pine Hill, on the above-named piece of ground, where the congregation worshiped until 1848. Among the documents belonging to St. Michael’s congregation is a grant dated February 9, 1818, by which “the German Lutheran and German Presbyterian congregations” became the joint owners of a piece of land containing over twenty-three acres, George Walker and George Hay acting as trustees for these congregations. In 1848 the old brick church, which is still standing at Pine Hill and occupied by the Missouri Lutherans, was jointly erected by the Evangelical Lutheran and Reformed congregations at a cost of $1,400, and was used as a place of worship by these jointly until 1856, when the Reformed erected a house for themselves. In 1860 the Lutheran congregation erected their present house of worship at a cost of eleven hundred dollars. The membership of St. Michael’s congregation and Sunday school at present is one hundred and twenty-five.
(Source: History of Bedford, Somerset & Fulton Counties, PA; 1884)
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