Father John A. Mountain was born in Philadelphia and studied at Atonement College in Graymore, NJ; St. Mary’s College and Seminary, North East, PA; St. John’s Seminary in Little Rock, AR, and the Sulpician Seminary in Washington, D. C.  He was ordained by the late Dennis Cardinal Dougherty, Archbishop of Philadelphia, on June 2, 1928. Early in his pastoral ministry, he served as assistant pastor of the Shrine of the Little Flower in Baltimore, at St. Patrick’s Church in Cumberland, and at St. Jerome’s in the early 1940’s; he then served at several churches in Washington and at St. Lawrence’s Church in Jessup. In late December 1951, Fr. Mountain was assigned to St. Peter’s in Libertytown, arriving on December 21 st . The statue of St. Peter, now standing in front of the church, formerly stood at the location of the first church.   It was on a pedestal   that read, “Thou art Pete and upon this rock I build my church.”   “Pete” was the last word of the first line of the inscription a

William Bunke was born on September 18,1891 [1] and his younger brother, Richard was born on December 28, 1895.  According to descendants of William’s brother, shortly after Richard’s birth, the brothers tragically lost their parents and were placed in a Baltimore orphanage.  By 1900, at age 9, the 1900 census shows William living and working on the Edward Hobbs farm outside the town of Liberty.   When William was 16, Charles Smith, a Catholic, married Edward’s daughter Juliette and in the 1910 census was living with his wife on the Hobb’s farm.  As a result, William was introduced to Catholicism and in 1915, 8 years after meeting Charles, was baptized by Fr. Kavanagh, Pastor of St. Peter’s, into the Catholic faith at age 24 [2] . William was called to serve during WWI and on July 25, 1917, two months before his 26th birthday, he   joined Company A of the 115th Infantry at the Frederick City Armory.  After a training period in Alabama from late 1917 to early 1918, Bunke and other me

Located adjacent to the church where we worship each week, is St. Peter’s Cemetery, an integral part of the history of our parish.  In addition to being the final resting place for many who attended at St. Peter’s before us, numerous memorials in the cemetery tell a story about the spirit of our forbearers. Ground for the original graveyard was gifted from James M. Coale, son of Richard and Catharine Coale, formalizing the donation by his father. While there are no known records to confirm when the first burials took place, we know that some Catholics who died in earlier years were buried elsewhere and later reinterred to St. Peter’s Cemetery.   One such example is Catharine McSherry Coale.   Her headstone contains an inscription that upon her death in 1815, she was buried at the church yard in Conewago, Pennsylvania and moved to St. Peter’s in October 1860. Early burials are located in the St. Peter’s section of the cemetery, the section closest to Route 75.   Some stones can be dec

Born in Russia on December 1, 1780, Francis Maleve entered the Society of Jesus in 1804. As a novice he was the first Jesuit from the area known as White Russia, now eastern Belarus, to be sent to the United States.  After arriving in Georgetown, he worked hard to master English but struggled with the language during some of his earliest sermons.  Fr. Maleve would be assigned to Frederick in 1811 succeeding Fr. John Dubois.   In reality a Frederick pastor had a very large area to shepherd, all of western Maryland and part of northern Virginia.   There were by that time two Catholic churches in northern Frederick County in addition to Mount St. Mary’s.   Still, Fr. Maleve would travel from Frederick to make sick calls as far as Martinsburg (then part of Virginia, now West Virginia).   After taking his final vows in June 1815, he undertook the construction of St. Joseph’s Church on Carrollton Manor on land donated by Charles Carroll, the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Indepen