Grace Presbyterian Church, located at 444 York Road in Jenkintown, is scheduled to receive a substantial facelift in 2024.

According to construction documents, Muyskans Community Hall will be renovated. Floor, wall coverings and ceilings will be replaced, and showers for mission projects will be installed.

Church directors also plan to upgrade the stage and replace existing lighting, reconstruct a commercial-sized kitchen, convert classrooms into a large community room/adult education meeting space, upgrade a youth lounge, reconfigure an entrance to enable disabled access, rehabilitate an elevator, install new windows, upgrade the heating/air conditioning system and electrical grid, and, last but not least, reroute and improve drainage and gutters around the building.

The project is included in the state’s 2023 Capital Improvement Program, and specific timelines are forthcoming.

A little history about Grace Presbyterian:

John Wanamaker, the widely-recognized merchant and religious, civic and political figure, helped to found the church in 1881.

Excerpted from the Grace Presbyterian’s website:

In the early 1860s, as America was ensnared in a bitter and brutal war, Mary Stewart began a practice that would alter the spiritual landscape of Montgomery County. After Sunday worship at Abington Presbyterian Church, Miss Stewart, often accompanied by one or more of her four sisters, would climb into a large wagon and travel a mile south by dirt toll-road. The wagon would gather children from around Jenkintown and bring them to the Lyceum (today’s Jenkintown Library) for Sunday school.

This Sunday school came to need its own building. John Wanamaker, the founder of Wanamaker’s department stores who would later become Postmaster General of the United States, offered to provide the funding. On September 8, 1872, Mr. Wanamaker led the Sunday school, now numbering 165, in a procession from the Lyceum to the new chapel and taught a lesson from the blackboard. 

For more of Wanamaker’s relationship to the early church, you can click here.

For all the latest news, follow us on Facebook or sign up for Glenside Local’s “Daily Buzz” newsletter here.