Gothic Revival brick rises in front of you at the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, better known as Historic St. Mary's Church, or in German, St. Marien-Kirche. This Roman Catholic parish was founded in 1741 to serve Lancaster’s German-speaking Catholics. In June of that year two German-speaking Jesuits from Maryland arrived, purchased land, and built a small log chapel they named St. John Nepomucene.
That first chapel stood until a night in December 1760 when it was lit ablaze; the chief burgess offered a reward for information, but no perpetrator was ever found. Two years later the community rebuilt: parishioners raised a new stone church, the men gathering limestone from the fields while the women mixed the mortar. Over its long life the parish has occupied three church buildings.
The building before you is the later Gothic Revival brick church, the current home of the parish, completed in 1854. The brick Gothic Revival church you face today, completed in 1854, is the third the parish has raised on this ground.