Excerpt from A History of Messiah's Evangelical Lutheran Church, South Williamsport, Penna

But even as the country had been rent by cleavage a few years before, so was history repeating itself in the growth of Lutheranism in the lumber town north of the river. In the Mother church on Market Street, the germ of dissension had been developing among its members, with brother pitted against brother, neighbor against neighbor, and friend against friend, but always more in the spirit of sorrow than of anger. The more conservative members of the church, quietly schooled in orthodox ritual and liturgy, viewed with heartfelt distress the sympathy of other members of the church with an informality of service contrary to the accustomed practices of St. Mark's. Good people, tried and true, on either side of the controversy, suffered grief and humiliation from this division of spirit. They saw only disaster for the church in its future development, but strangely enough the cleavage proved to be a healthy one that gave birth to a forward movement of Lutheranism in the community. Six short years after the war, a group of young men just entering business and professional life, with little money in their purses but vigorously endowed with energy and talents, left the Mother church to establish another Lutheran church in the community, St. Paul's. This new organization fulfilled a deep-seated need in a town where every newsmokestack that nosed its way skyward brought an influx of settlers. The Lutheran churches of Williamsport were meeting the demands of a reconstruction era, for differ though they would in matters of ritual, they were still united by one faith and by one God, and they were not content to lie in inglorious ease, unresponsive to the needs of their community for a living God.

Out of much the same staunch divergence of spirit was born Messiah's Lutheran Church on the south banks of the river, unheralded and unsung, for search as we may in the yellowed, brittle pages of the early newspapers for some record of its birth, we find only an oppressive volume of silence. Out of such families as the Weisses, the Lutchers, the Weigels, the Rickarts, the Jarretts, the Aults, and the Turks, who at one time were the representative families of St. Mark's, our church received its early impetus. Many of these families were early settlers in the plateau on the south bank of the river, known among early explorers as Lower Bottom to distinguish it from Upper Bottom across from Linden. Even as they hewed rocks from their cellars the size of mountain boulders, and grimly moulded for themselves a village appropriately called Rocktown, we like to believe that the same pioneer steadfastness that fashioned a community out of stone, founded a church out of the same unyielding faith.

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