This is the weird errand that took me back to the area around Saltsburg, in the previous post.
In 1950, suburban sprawl was rapidly overtaking the farmland south of Pittsburgh. This photo was taken on Bower Hill Road at Parkview in about 1951. All the forests and farms in the background are now the neighborhoods of Mt. Lebanon and Scott Township. The parish I serve was created, and they purchased a military hospital hut from Camp Shelby, Mississippi, to serve as their first church building. They quickly outgrew it, and five years later they began construction on the sprawling monstrosity of a facility in which they now rattle around like a handful of nickels in an oil drum... (They should have kept this little place to return to, but back in those days, no one knew that people would ever stop going to church.) The old military hospital ward was disassembled, trucked off, and reassembled in a little coal-mining village named Forbes Road, in the hills about 50 miles east of here. The congregation that bought the building has no online presence, and I'm not really sure if they're even still in operation. So, I got the urge to drive out there to see if the building was still standing and still in use.
And lookie here! I found it! The sign out front calls it "Forbes Road Christian Fellowship Church." (Stacking the words "Fellowship" and "Church" seems redundant to me, but what's it matter?) I can't tell if it's still being used, but it's very definitely the same building. It went from military hospital to thriving suburban church to...whatever it is now. The steel cross on top of the steeple in the first picture used to sit in a storage room in our current building, but I haven't seen it in years...
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