St. Luke’s Church was started in 1850 by Rev. William Drees and a small group of his Dutch Reformed congregation.
St. Paul’s Evangelical Reformed Church was organized around the year 1852 as the German Evangelical Reformed Church.
The church was located on Suffolk Street near Delancey Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
In 1904 just about one in four New Yorkers was German — either an immigrant or a child of an immigrant.
In 2005 the NYG&B Collection acquired 199 reels of microfilm containing the famous “Walloon Index” or Collection des Fiches of the Bibliothèque Wallonne in Leiden, The Netherlands.
Rev. Francis J. Schneider arrived in New York sometime during or before 1869 with his wife, Cecelia, and their two sons,1 and immediately set to work. He was a Protestant minister unconnected to any established church.