History

The story of All Saints Greek Orthodox Church of Weirton, West Virginia is inseparable from the story of Weirton itself. In the early decades of the twentieth century, men from all parts of Greece and Asia Minor migrated to work in the steel mills of what would become the largest unincorporated city in America, drawn by wages that were good even if the jobs were demanding, menial, and dangerous. Until a church of their own existed, religious services were held in halls and private homes, with transportation by electric streetcar requiring advance reservations with the street car company for holiday celebrations.

In 1915, a group of Greek immigrants approached J.C. Williams, president of the Weirton Steel Company, to discuss the construction of a church. Williams, a man of foresight and wisdom, recognized that these men and women who had come from the meager hillsides of Greece needed a place to worship in their own way, and he was supportive of the effort. A Building Committee was formed and the cornerstone was laid in the spring of 1916. Compulsory day wages and deductions from each Greek employee of the Weirton Steel Company, alongside other contributions, augmented the building fund. The church was officially established in 1917, and Nicholas Dimos suggested the name All Saints to honor all the patron saints of the different Greek regions from which the parish's founders had come, a name of remarkable inclusivity for a community assembled from so many corners of the Greek world. On March 25, 1918, the Greek religious and national holiday of the Annunciation and Greek Independence Day, the first Divine Liturgy was celebrated by the Reverend Father Neophitos Iosafeos, himself an iconographer who slept in the church while painting the icons that remain on the iconostasion to this day. Two years later a Greek parochial school was established.

Following World War II, the enthusiastic parishioners sought a new and larger church. In the fall of 1944 the General Assembly passed a resolution to build, and a Building Fund Committee assembled that met with Mayor Thomas E. Millsop of Weirton and president of Weirton Steel to inform him of their plans. Archbishop Athenagoras, who would later become the 268th Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, laid the cornerstone of the new church edifice in 1947, and Archbishop Michael dedicated the completed building on Sunday, June 4, 1950. In 1967 the church underwent a large-scale renovation that included the installation of stainless steel on the dome and bell towers, making All Saints the only church in the United States with a stainless steel dome and bell towers, a material chosen as symbolic of both the steel industry that built the community and the enduring strength of the Greek Orthodox faith. In May 2017, Archbishop Demetrios of America presided over the parish's centennial celebration, honoring one hundred years of unbroken Orthodox witness in the Ohio Valley.

All Saints Greek Orthodox Church at 3528 West Street in Weirton serves the Orthodox Christian faithful of the Northern Panhandle of West Virginia as a parish of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Pittsburgh within the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, a beacon of Orthodoxy in the Ohio Valley whose stainless steel dome stands as a permanent monument to the immigrant steelworkers who built it.