File:St. Paul's Lutheran Church, Amherst, New York - 20211101.jpg

English: St. Paul's Lutheran Church, 4007 Main Street, Amherst, New York, November 2021. The oldest extant Lutheran congregation in Erie County, St. Paul's history dates back to 1827, when it was one of four established by the Rev. Vincent Philip Meyerhoffer (1784-1859), a convert from Catholicism who'd served as a chaplain in the Austro-Hungarian army during the Napoleonic Wars, lived briefly in Western New York, then converted again to Anglicanism and moved to Canada. In the early days, it served the spiritual needs of Lutherans in a vast geographic area comprising both the "North Bush" (the modern-day hamlet of Getzville, principally of Alsatian stock) and the "South Bush" (now part of the neighboring Town of Cheektowaga, principally from Central and Eastern Germany). The present building, constructed in 1880, is the third to house the congregation, all on the same site; it replaced a brick structure that had been built in 1875 and destroyed by fire just four years later. It's a wood-framed structure of a simple, vernacular Gothic Revival architectural style whose façade was clad in brick veneer during a 1933 renovation.