Found It: The Alleghenyville Mennonite Meetinghouse

The Alleghenyville Mennonite Meetinghouse is a small historic church on Horning Road in Brecknock Township, Berks County, Pennsylvania. It was built in 1855 from local sandstone and designated a National Historic Landmark by the National Park Service in 2009. What makes it remarkable is how little has changed since it was built. The interior is still original. The structure is still largely unaltered. For something that old, that’s not common.

I didn’t set out to find it. My phone had died somewhere on the back roads of southeast Pennsylvania and I was just taking lefts and rights looking for anything interesting. Then I caught one of those small blue historical marker signs at the edge of the road. That was enough to send me backtracking through a few wrong turns trying to track it down.

The video below has the full ride. It’s a short one, but it captures what it’s like to stumble onto something like this with zero plan and a dead battery.

If you want to see the cemetery and the grounds up close, the video is worth a watch.

What Is the Alleghenyville Mennonite Meetinghouse

The history here goes back further than the building itself. The Mennonite community in this valley traces its roots to October 1745, when a man named Jacob Bowman received a land grant in the area. Jacob was a descendant of Swiss Mennonite immigrants and had made his way east from the Pequea Colony in Lancaster County after an Indian told him to settle near a stream where the water flows toward the rising sun. He followed that advice into a valley the Indians called “Olleghany,” settled there, and by around 1754 a congregation had formed.

For years the community met in homes and a shared log schoolhouse before eventually building a permanent structure. The meetinghouse on Horning Road was built in 1855 on land donated by a man named Solomon Weber. It’s a sandstone building and it was constructed to be simple, which is exactly how it looks today. The National Park Service application for landmark status noted that the property retains the ability to convey how Pennsylvania German Mennonite congregations built and used their places of worship in the 1850s. That’s a formal way of saying almost nothing has been touched.

Regular services ran for many years until the congregation dwindled down to nine members and eventually disbanded in 1954. Since 1977 an annual outdoor historical service has been held on the grounds each summer, and the Alleghany Mennonite Historical Association has overseen the property since 1994.

How to Get There

The meetinghouse sits along Horning Road in Brecknock Township, Berks County. It’s in the kind of rural area where GPS occasionally checks out on you, which is exactly what mine did that day. If you’re heading out specifically to find it, search for the Allegheny Mennonite Meetinghouse in Berks County and sort out your directions before you leave. Doing it with a dead phone on unfamiliar back roads made for a good story but cost me the better part of an hour.

Worth knowing: the Bauman-Eshleman Cemetery is located across the road from the meetinghouse, not directly on the same grounds. I spotted the cemetery first and that’s what pulled me in.

What to Expect When You Arrive

The meetinghouse is small and unassuming. There’s no elaborate visitor setup, no interpretive signs out front, no indication from the road that you’re looking at a National Historic Landmark. It carries itself quietly.

The Bauman-Eshleman Cemetery across the road is where you want to spend some time. Gravestones on that property date back to the mid-1700s. I was standing in front of stones marked 1792 and 1796 and those weren’t even close to the oldest ones there. Some of the earlier markers are so weathered the dates are barely readable anymore.

I noticed that the cemetery seems to have two distinct sections. The stones toward the front face the opposite direction from the ones further out. My best guess is that the original burial ground expanded outward over the years with the newer additions oriented differently. Even the stones further out are still old. The whole cemetery goes back a long way.

Give yourself time to walk it slowly. A lot of the names and dates require patience to read. The ones that are still legible are worth finding.

It was warmer than expected the day I stopped. I’d left in the morning when it was around 32 degrees and by the time I tracked the place down I was already thinking about shedding a layer. If you’re planning a spring ride out this way, temperatures in Berks County can shift quite a bit from early morning to midday.

Why It Makes a Great Motorcycle Ride

This part of Berks County is exactly the kind of area worth exploring on a bike. The roads between small communities wind through farmland and wooded stretches with almost no traffic. Route 222 cuts through the region if you need a reference point, but the good riding is on the smaller roads off the main route.

I wasn’t following a planned route when I found this place. I had just turned the camera on because I thought something might come of it. That’s kind of the point. Southeast Pennsylvania has a lot of small historic sites sitting along roads that look like nothing on a map but feel great to ride. The Alleghenyville Mennonite Meetinghouse is a good reason to follow the blue signs when you see them.

If you’re building a day ride around this stop, the surrounding Berks County roads are as much the draw as the destination. Pair it with food in one of the small towns nearby and you’ve got a solid half-day loop.

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