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Wright's United Methodist Church

788 Venetia Road
724-348-5718

Enoch and Rachel Wright were the parents of only one child, a son Joseph, born in 1794, who attended Canonsburg College and later became a local preacher in the Methodist Episcopal Church. He married Catherine Hopkins in 1814 and to them were born eleven children.

Although Enoch was a staunch member of the Peters Creek Baptist Church in Library in 1823 he gave the land and means to build a church and cemetery nearer his home. The church was known as Wright's Chapel and was open to all denominations. Enoch and his wife both died on the old farm, he in 1846 and Rachel twenty years later, at the age of 88.


An analysis of the persons mentioned in the will reveals Enoch was attached to his family and, evidently very proud of all his grandchildren. It seems a little puzzling to find so little given his son, Joseph? Could he have been aware of the physical condition of his son so that he was afraid that, upon his death, the estate could have gone to the Hopkins family, or to the Methodist Church? He had stayed a member of the Peters Creek Baptist Church of Library, PA, even though his son had caused him to give the land and building, he had readied for the Baptist or non-denominational, to the Methodist Church.

Rev. Joseph Wright was quite a scholar and was compiling a dictionary at the time of his death in 1851. Sometime earlier he had influenced his father to deed the chapel to the Methodist Church with the provision that "no slaveholding or pro slavery preacher be ever permitted to officiate, lecture or preach in said house".

In 1854, the church was badly damaged by a tornado, which blew off the roof and spread the walls. All the money for repairs was collected the day after the stormby David B. Connelly of the Mingo Church from the neighboring congregations, who subscribed promptly and liberally as a sort of Thanksoffering for their own escape from disaster.


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