Well, welcome back to another episode of Five Minutes in Church History. For this episode,

I am on location. I am in the great city, the steel city of Pittsburgh, and I am right

next to first Presbyterian Church in downtown Pittsburgh. More on that later, but first,

let's think about the first European religious services that would have been held here in Pittsburgh.

And the first would have been Catholic services. It was the Catholics who had Fort De Cane

at the point where the two rivers converged to form a third. In 1758, General Forbes was

moving his British troops closer to Fort De Cane. The French realized they were vastly

outnumbered, and so they withdrew from their fort, blew it up, and went away. So, incomes

General Forbes and incomes the British. This was 1758, and there were two services that were

held Protestant services, the first Protestant religious services held in this area. One was an

Anglican service, following, of course, the Book of Common Worship and the Book of Common Prayer,

and the second was a Presbyterian service. Presbyterians were a part of General Forbes troops. These

were the Scots and Dyrish, and one of them, Charles Beatty, was actually Chaplin to General Forbes,

and he would have held a service here in Pittsburgh. Of course, it was renamed from Fort De Cane

to Fort Pitt, and then it became Pittsburgh, two words, and then it became Pittsburgh. And after

the establishment of Fort Pitt, there were settlers, and by 1773, these Presbyterians were ready to

call their first minister. They reached out to the Donagall Presbyteria to the east, and they

called two pastors, and for quite a few years, they simply met in the homes of the parishioners.

By 1787, they had purchased a parcel of land, and they built a log church. But by 1805, that log

church was too small for the congregation, so they built a new brick church. But here's the thing,

they built the new church around the old log church. That way, they could keep meeting inside the

log church as the building progressed. When they finished that new building that surrounded the

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