Bethlehem United Church of Christ

In the late 1820s and early 1830s many German Protestant immigrants settled in the Ann Arbor area. Desiring to worship in German, they wrote Switzerland’s Basel Mission to request a pastor. On August 20, 1833, the Reverend Friedrich Schmid arrived to help found one of Michigan’s first German congregations. The church was formally organized on November 3, 1833, as the First German Evangelical Society of Scio. The next month, the congregation completed a modest log structure at the site of the present Bethlehem Cemetery. It built a second church at First and Washington in 1849, and in 1896 dedicated the present stone structure. From 1846 to 1916 the church conducted a parochial school. In 1945 the congregation became an Evangelical and Reformed church; it joined the United Church of Christ in 1958.