A Greensburg shopping plaza has been sold to a Unity church.

Charter Oak Church on Frye Farm Road has purchased the Mid Town Plaza, at 450 S. Main St., from First Evangelical Lutheran Church at 246 S. Main St. for $1.15 million, through its COC Holdings LLC, according to documents filed in October with the Westmoreland County Recorder of Deeds.

The church, in turn, provided COC Holdings with a $1.2 million mortgage for the 3.9-acre property. COC Holdings is the subsidiary Charter Oak Church created to manage its properties, said Skip Bennett, executive director of expansion for Charter Oak Church.

Charter Oak Church intends to use a vacant portion of the Mid Town Plaza building as its new home for a Greensburg church, said Nathan Anderson, president of the Charter Oak Church council. The church currently uses the Crossroads plaza at 1075 S. Main St., South Greensburg, for its Greensburg campus, but it has outgrown that space, Anderson said.

“We want to be in the heart of the city,” Anderson said Monday.

Charter Oak Church, which is part of the Global Methodist Church, is in the process of remodeling the space used by the former Scott Electric Insta Print business into a worship site that it hopes to open next summer, Bennett said. The church, previously associated with the United Methodist Church, has been looking for space to expand from its Crossroads site for seven years, he said.

“There’s a lot of work” to be done to remodel the space, Bennett said.

The church also wants to continue to have tenants in the Mid Town Plaza, which currently houses a Dollar General store. The church also will continue to lease the parking lot spaces, he said.

The First Evangelical Lutheran Church council had decided that ownership of the shopping plaza was not fitting into what the church needed, said Chris Combs, pastor of the church. The church had a long-term lease with a third party operating the plaza where the Dollar General store is located and previously held the Lighting Gallery, but that lease expired in 2018, Combs said.

Charter Oak Church also has campuses in a church at 100 S. Second St., Jeannette, and services at the Laurel Valley YMCA in East Huntingdon, according to its website. Christian Counseling Associates, which also uses space at the Crossroads plaza where Charter Oak Church has services, would have an opportunity to move into space at the Mid Town Plaza, Bennett said.

Former cemetery

The land that holds the plaza once was the site of a historic German cemetery in the 1800s, until Greensburg officials decided to eliminate burials in the city, Combs said. The cemetery held the grave of Christopher Truby, a Lutheran who was a co-founder of Greensburg, who died in 1802, according to “A Bicentennial History of City of Greensburg,” written by the late Bob Van Atta for the city’s bicentennial in 1999.

Officials of what was then Greensburg Borough banned cemeteries in 1891, according to Van Atta’s book. The bodies were exhumed and buried elsewhere, Combs said.

The city took ownership of the historic cemetery at St. Clair Park off North Maple Avenue, Van Atta said. Greensburg officials did not require the bodies in that cemetery to be exhumed.

First Evangelical Lutheran Church’s former cemetery, which Van Atta described as being the “neglected old German cemetery,” was cleared with the city’s help in 1945. It cleared the way for a shopping plaza that was built in 1959.

The church council has yet to decide how it will use the proceeds from the sale, Combs said. The church has an active membership of about 200.

“We have a long history of generosity here. I think that will play a factor into it,” Combs said, referring to the decision on how to use the money.

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