Lost and Found

Lost

A cornerstone of Pittsburgh’s African American community and an architecturally significant landmark in the city’s predominantly black Hill District, Ebenezer Baptist Church was destroyed by fire – which also claimed the lives of two firefighters – in March 2004. Formed in 1875, Ebenezer Baptist was the first black congregation in western Pennsylvania to own its own church building. Shortly after acquiring the property from another congregation in the early twentieth century, the church hosted the annual conference of the National Urban League in 1932. The church stood at the center of Pitts­burgh’s civil rights movement, playing host to Martin Luther King Jr. and serving as a command cen­ter for city police during the race riots of 1968. It was characterized “as an early example of the organizational cohesiveness of the black community in Allegheny County.”

Found

The normal school established in 1858 at Upland, Delaware County, by textile manufacturer John Price Crozer (1873-1866), served as an army hospital during the Civil War. Endowed as the Crozer Theological Seminary by the philanthropist’s family two years after his death, the Baptist-affiliated institution educated clergy for a more than a century, until 1970, when it merged with the ecumenical Colgate­ Rochester Seminary and moved to Rochester, New York. In September 1948, Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968) arrived at Crozer Theological Seminary to begin three years of schooling, graduating in May 1951 with a bachelor of divinity degree. King lived in room 52 of “Old Main,” which housed the semi­nary’s principal activities. “Old Main” is now part of the campus of Crozer-Chester Medical Center.