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| This picture shows Imri Hutchings (standing at right), the second president of the West Penn District, along with his first counselor, Samuel Aston (standing at left), and several others at a district outing in South Park circa 1950. President Hutchings’ wife, Bernice, is sitting in the back on the left, and Sister Emma Grace Hare, the first president of the district Relief Society, is sitting in front of her. This picture appears in From These Hills and Valleys. |
In
October of 1943, Eastern States Mission President formed the West Penn District
with Jay Wrathall as the district president.
President Wrathall had previously served as the president of the
Pittsburgh Branch (which is now the Pittsburgh First Ward) from 1931 to 1933
and again from 1937 to 1943.
The
district included three branches—Pittsburgh, Wilson (now the Pittsburgh Second
Ward) and Washington as well as Sunday Schools in towns as far away as
Johnstown and Carmichaels. Wrathall and
his counselors spent many Sundays traveling all around the district; their
travel was facilitated by the clergymen’s coupons for gas that the district
president had access to, this being during World War II when gas was
rationed. He was succeeded as district
president by Clarence Bigler in 1947 and by Imri Hutchings in 1949.
When
Hutchings was called to the position, there were 750 members in the three
branches, but two of the branches were being led by missionaries, as there were
very few Pittsburgh-area natives with Church leadership experience. Hutchings chose leaders through inspiration
and taught the members of the branches about “love and forgiveness,” as those
who were called to lead were not always the most well-liked members.
He
and his counselors also located members meeting in the more distant parts of
the district and organized branches by starting with the most important
auxiliary. “We found that the most successful way to start a branch was to
start a Relief Society,” he explained.
Branches were organized in Butler, Punxsutawney, Johnstown and even East
Liverpool, Ohio, during his tenure.
Hutchings also reached out to Saints in the region by holding leadership
meetings with the Erie District and sending officers to conferences in
Harrisburg and New York State, but the Erie meetings were less than successful;
“there were so few (in attendance there) that most of the time we all traveled
in one automobile.”
The
West Penn District’s auxiliaries were also organized gradually during this
period. The district Relief Society was
organized in 1949 and went through many of the same challenges of
transportation and communication as its predecessor in the West Pennsylvania
Conference. These challenges were
exacerbated by the geographic area of the district, which stretched from Wintersville,
Ohio, to Johnstown, but they were met with unfailing resolve.
The
first elders quorum in the district, which was called the Second Quorum of
Elders since there was a First Quorum in Philadelphia, wasn’t organized until
1958, and it started out with just 75 elders scattered across ten branches. However, as with the rest of the local Church
membership, the Second Quorum grew fairly quickly, as a Third Quorum had been
formed by 1963.
The
growth of the Church organization in the Pittsburgh area continued apace in the
1960s. On November 13, 1960, the Eastern
Atlantic States Mission (which included Pittsburgh) was formed from the Eastern
States Mission. Two days later,
Hutchings was succeeded as district president by Frank Young, who held the
position until the Pittsburgh Stake was formed in 1969.
In
1963, the West Penn District sent out its first full-time missionary, Sister
Erma Wollensack of the Pittsburgh Branch.
The foundation for her successors as missionaries from Pittsburgh began
to be laid two years later, when the district’s first seminary class took place
in Upper St. Clair, a distant southern suburb of the city.
And
in 1967, the missionary effort within the district was enhanced with the
formation of the West Penn District Mission, which was roughly equivalent to
the (now-discontinued) stake missions of more recent years and the ward
missions that continue to exist. The
district mission’s first president was Orrin Hatch, a native of the Pittsburgh
suburb of Baldwin who presently serves as a US Senator representing Utah.
The
dreams of the members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in
southwestern Pennsylvania to have a fully formed Church organization in their
area finally came to fruition at the end of the 1960s with the formation of the
Pittsburgh Pennsylvania Stake. But that
is another tale for another post. Until
next time…
Respectfully
submitted,
Rush
David
Pittsburgh
Stake Historian
