Wood township

St. Michael's, the onion-domed church at Woodvale

St. Michael's Greek Orthodox Church, High Street, WoodvaleLibrary of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey / Historic American Engineering Record. No known copyright restrictions. pa2085

St. Michael's Greek Orthodox Church stands on a small parcel of High Street land that its founders obtained from the coal company. The Historic American Buildings Survey, which recorded the church in 1989, says the parish was organized in 1917 by immigrants from the Galician and Carpathian Mountain region of eastern Europe, and that they built a wood-frame church with a center steeple, an onion dome and a Greek Orthodox cross atop its spire. Members of the congregation told the survey the church was originally elaborately decorated with murals.

That first church burned in the 1930s. The congregation rebuilt it immediately, and the survey says photographs of the old exterior indicate the builders worked to reproduce many of the original architectural elements. The survey names one feature that differed, at the back: the new church has a curved rear wall where its predecessor's was straight. The 1992 National Register nomination for the Woodvale Historic District describes the same rebuilding and lists a second difference, a small one-story entrance vestibule.

The congregation also built a hall across the street, where it held meetings, dances and other social events, and laid out a large cemetery northwest of town. The survey found the church, the hall and the cemetery all still in use in 1989 and called them integral parts of the community. The church at first rented half of a double house as a parsonage; by 1989 it was building a new parsonage beside the church.

The county's 1991 inventory of historic engineering and industrial sites counts St. Michael's as one of three onion-domed churches in Huntingdon County, with the other two in Mount Union and Huntingdon.

In 1917, immigrants from the Galacian and Carpathian Mountain region of eastern Europe organized a Greek Orthodox parish in Woodvale, obtaining a small parcel of land on High Street from the coal company, on which to build a church.Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey / Historic American Engineering Record, St. Michael's Greek Orthodox Church, written data pages, HABS PA-5570 data pages, page 2 · character 892 of the scanned text

Checked against the record. Checked against the survey's written record before publication; 4 claims it did not support were removed or corrected.

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