Third German Protestant Memorial dates its history back to the German Lutheran and Reformed Church, which was founded in 1814 by a Moravian missionary, Joseph Zaeslin. According to church records, Zaeslin gathered German Protestants and Catholics alike to worship together in the first German language services in Cincinnati at the German Evangelical Lutheran and Reformed Church. Though the church did not officially affiliate itself with any denomination until 1924 when it joined the American Unitarian Association, and welcomed all German speaking peoples, the church’s early meetings were often full of controversy and arguments between those from northern Germany and those from southern Germany.
Don Heinrich Tolzmann writes in Das Ohiotal — The Ohio Valley: The German Dimension about a debate in which the members argued for or against the construction of a new church so enthusiastically that “on one beautiful Sunday the Swabians and the non-Swabians became so heated about this project, that the ramshackle floor collapsed as a result of the foot-stamping and noise-making, and the squabblers were all brought together in the unity in the basement below.” For obvious reasons, this ended the argument and it forced all members to concede the need for a new church. After the new church building was constructed, the dissension continued and the parish went through several pastors who quit the place soon after their installments.
One such man was Wilhelm Moellmann, who was of North German descent. His work with the church, much like that of the pastors before him, was plagued with revolt, and parishioners repeatedly locked him out of the church and interrupted his sermons. Unable to take the strain of such a congregation, Moellmann eventually resigned. Not long after, members of the congregation loyal to Moellmann split with the German Evangelical and Reformed Church to create North German Lutheran Church and elected him as pastor.
The parish erected a church on Walnut Street between Eighth and Ninth Streets in 1839, and took measures to ensure unity in the parish by requiring all members to be “knowledgeable in the Low German language (der plattdeutschen Sprache).” The congregation was eventually known as Third German Memorial Protestant Church but after World War I, like so many other German-American organizations, the church dropped “German” from its name to become Third Protestant Memorial Church and began using English exclusively. The parish moved many times over the years, occupying buildings on Second Street as well as the corner of Fifteenth and Race Streets in Over-the-Rhine. Eventually the congregation moved to its final location on Calhoun Street near the University of Cincinnati, where it closed in 2001 due to lack of membership.
Bibliographical Sources:
Das Ohiotal– The Ohio Valley: The German Dimension, edited by Don Heinrich Tolzmann, Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York, 1993, pages 165-183
History of the German Evangelical Churches in Cincinnati, by Robert C. Rau, accessed 28th November 2009.
