File:St. John's Lutheran Church, Lancaster, New York - 20230112.jpg

English: St. John's Lutheran Church, 55 Pleasant Avenue at School Street, Lancaster, New York, January 2023. Built in 1877, this prim and proper brick church building represents a simplified and vernacularized take on the then-popular Romanesque Revival school of architecture: witness the round arches atop the windows and entrance, relatively stout massing (leaving aside the atypical spindly steeple), and especially the raking arcaded corbeling that undergirds the eaves of both the main front gable and also the gablet at the base of the tower. Established in 1844 to serve a German-speaking immigrant farm community, the congregation's original name - the First German Lutheran Church of Lancaster - belied its initial status as an interdenominational congregation with a large contingent of members who followed the German Reformed doctrine. Relations between the two groups were often rocky and in the end downright acrimonious, culminating in a dramatic schism in which the Reformed worshipers absconded with the original church building, a simple log cabin which they jacked up on rollers and hauled away to a new site. The resulting litigation earned the Lutherans a hefty settlement which was used to finance the construction of the present building. The church took on its current name upon affiliating with the United Lutheran Church in 1918, one of the founding congregations of that new synod. The middle 20th century in the U.S. was characterized by an automobile-enabled mass migration of middle-class city dwellers to newly suburbanized peripheral towns of which Lancaster is a perfect example, and accordingly the membership ranks at St. John's grew meteorically during this period. A three-story parish house, an expanded chancel, and a new parsonage were some of the improvements added to the building to accommodate these newcomers.