St. Thomas Lutheran Church celebrates 175 years
St. Thomas Lutheran Church. Photo courtesy of Elissa Weidmayer.
St. Thomas Lutheran Church, located in Freedom Township on West Ellsworth Road, is celebrating its 175th anniversary this year. The 175th anniversary coincides with the 500th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation from the Catholic Church which influenced the theme the church chose for the celebration, “God – Our Mighty Fortress for 175 Years.” The church has a number of events scheduled throughout this year.
This history of St. Thomas Lutheran Church is tied up with the history of other local churches and this has to do with the first pastor, Pastor Friedrich Schmid. Elissa Holleran Weidmayer of St. Thomas, relayed Schmid’s story and the history of St. Thomas:
Schmid was born in Waldorf near Nagold, in Wuerttemberg, Germany on September 6, 1807. As a young man he was employed as a blacksmith but contact with missionaries who had returned to Germany resulted in Schmid’s decision to enter the Basel Mission Institute in Switzerland. This institute had be organized in order to supply missionaries for Africa and India. In fact, this institution had sent no missionaries to America until it commissioned Friedrich Schmid, who was 25 at the time, as its first missionary to America in 1833.
Schmid arrived in Detroit on August 10, 1833 and conducted services in the city for the first time eight days later, on August 18th, in a Detroit carpenter shop. Two days days later, Schmid arrived in Ann Arbor and conducted his first service on August 26th in a school building now known as the Sullivan School, located about 12 miles west of Ann Arbor.
Photo courtesy of Elissa Weidmayer.
In addition to his preaching and pastoral duties in the Ann Arbor area, Schmid was continually journeying to visit the scattered settlements of Germans throughout Michigan. Twenty congregations in Michigan claim Schmid as their founder. In addition to St. Thomas, Schmid organized Salem Lutheran Church in Scio Twp, Bethel in Freedom Twp, St. John’s in Bridgewater, St. Paul’s in Chelsea, and Zion and Bethlehem in Ann Arbor, to name only a few. Schmid was so poor during his first seven years in America that all his journeys had to be made on foot since he could not afford a horse. Schmid married Louisa Mann when he was 27 and she was 17.
Pastor Schmid continued to serve at St. Thomas until 1867. About this time, the effects of an unnamed disease which caused Schmid to become progressively weakened forced him to retire from most of his parish activities. Schmid died on August 30, 1883. He was buried on September 3rd in Bethlehem Cemetery in Ann Arbor.
The date when St. Thomas was founded cannot be precisely determined. In April of 1843, Schmid reports that he is serving eight preaching stations on a regular basis, but he fails to give the names of the congregations involved. St. Thomas historians assume, however, that St. Thomas was one of these congregations. An assumption confirmed by Schmid’s son, Frederick Schmid, Jr., who wrote a short history of his father’s work in Michigan and assigned the date 1842 to the founding of St. Thomas. While no descendants of the original church founders still attend St. Thomas today, Schmid’s burial records include last names of Feldkamp, Horning, Heuser, Buss, and Bollinger, all of which are still familiar names in Manchester and surrounding communities.
St. Thomas Lutheran Church. Photo courtesy of Elissa Weidmayer.
St. Thomas focused on this history and its German heritage, twenty-five years ago when they celebrated their 150th anniversary. At that time they worked to receive their historical marker, learned the Lord’s Prayer in German, and fixed their crumbled headstones. In addition, they regularly read Schmid’s history and letters, had a service in German with English translation, had a German potluck day and had many previous pastors and the President of the LCMS speak and more.
To celebrate the 175th anniversary, the church has different activities scheduled throughout the year, all of which will be open to the public. Two activities they have coming up in March are a Mom2Mom sale at the Freedom Town Hall on March 4th and a Parents Night Out on March 18th. They are also hoping to have a Mother’s Day Fashion Show during their service on Mother’s Day, and a Father’s Day Fashion Show during their service on Father’s Day. Other activities are still in the process of being planned but all events will be open to the public.
This year also marks the 5th anniversary of the opening of the church’s Freedom Child Care Center. The center, located on Pleasant Lake Rd, opened in 2012. Weidmayer reports that opening the center was a huge leap of faith: “We are a relatively small congregation and it took a lot of volunteer work and dedication from many of our members to make it happen. We started out with only 10 children and we have grown to over 25 now, with having just recently received approval to grow again to 37 children.” St. Thomas is planning to have an outdoor service at Freedom Child Care Center in August to celebrate 5 years since it opened, and an outdoor service on September 17th at the church to officially celebrate the anniversary.
The opening of the Childcare Center was a big change change for the church, but it has changed in other ways over the years as well. In 1964 and 1965 the church was raised and a full basement dug out underneath it to include a bathroom and regular furnace. Weidmayer explained that services used to be exclusively in German until English services were introduced sometime between 1932-1941.
“To familiarize the members with English hymns, all were invited to the parsonage every Wednesday night for song practice. By 1953 only one German service per month remained and sometime in the next decade they stopped altogether,” she stated. Weidmayer’s husband’s family was directly responsible for one of the changes that occurred. She explained, “Women and men used to sit on separate sides of the church. The story is that two members (my husband’s grandparents), Alvin and Luella Weidmayer, were the people who ended that tradition. When they began attending St. Thomas in the early 1950s, they didn’t want to sit separate from each other so they sat on the same side and everyone else started doing it too!”
Weidmayer explained that what poses challenges, is also what makes St. Thomas’s unique. “Our church is unique in its size and its dedication to tradition. We continue to have our annual German Bake Sale on the 1st Saturday in December which has been going on for well over 50 years. We do struggle because our location is off the beaten path and many people don’t know about us but we do have visitors who come looking for distant relatives that are buried in our cemetery, which they learned about on ancestry.com. We are also unique from other churches in that we have an operating child care center. We have been told we are one of the friendliest churches by many visitors and we welcome any and all newcomers to check us out!”
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