Three years before receiving this commission, Hoxie designed the towered Italianate railroad station in Harrisburg for the Pennsylvania Railroad, now remembered as the backdrop for photographs of the Abraham Lincoln sarcophagus beginning its mournful trip into the nation's heartland. For this church, Hoxie adopted the direction of his erstwhile Philadelphia partner Stephen D. Button, who had utilized a similar German two-towered facade screening a second-story sanctuary for the Presbyterian church in York (
YO17).