Schellsburg: Palatine Germans on the Lincoln Highway

Schellsburg sits nine miles west of Bedford in the Allegheny Mountains on what is now US Route Thirty, once the Lincoln Highway and before that a wagon road across the Pennsylvania mountains. The town takes its name from John Schell, whose grandfather Michael had emigrated from the German Palatinate to Philadelphia in seventeen twenty-seven. In eighteen hundred, John Schell bought land in Bedford County, and in eighteen oh eight he laid out the village on the old Nine-Mile Town tract.

Among the first things the community built was a shared log church, completed in eighteen oh six, that served both a Lutheran and a German Reformed congregation under one roof. That Old Log Church still stands as the oldest surviving church building in Bedford County and marks Schellsburg as one of many Palatine-German footholds strung along the corridor across the mountains.