Andrew Arnold Lambing

Who was Andrew Arnold Lambing?

Monsignor Andrew Arnold Lambing or Rev. A. A. Lambing was an American Roman Catholic priest and historian. He was one of the nation's foremost priest-historians, having founded the first Catholic historical society in the United States as well as the first Catholic historical quarterly.

Born in a hamlet that became Manorville, Armstrong County, Pennsylvania, adjacent to Ford City, he worked as a boy on his family's farm. As an adolescent he labored in a brick yard and in the pioneering oil business of Samuel Kier on the Allegheny River. At age 21 Lambing entered St. Michael's Preparatory and Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh, was ordained in 1869 by Bishop Michael Domenec, and was briefly assigned to teach history at St. Francis College, Loretto. Thereafter, during forty years of Pittsburgh's post-Civil War, industrial and population boom, he ministered to thousands of the city's Catholic immigrants from Europe. During the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, he was credited with calming some strikers intent on destroying a freight depot of the Pennsylvania Railroad in the city's rail yards.

Lambing was among the first academically-trained historians of Western Pennsylvania and the first to document the beginnings of the Catholic Church there. Two of his most important contributions were the first English translation, from the French, of the 1749 journal of Pierre Joseph Céloron de Blainville and the publication of the register of baptisms at Fort Duquesne. He wrote numerous articles for newspapers and magazines on historical and religious subjects, including a majority of two early and significant regional histories: History of Allegheny County and the Standard History of Pittsburgh. He served as president of the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania. Andrew Carnegie appointed Lambing a trustee of both the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh and the Carnegie School of Technology. In 1883 the University of Notre Dame conferred on him the honorary degree of Master of Arts and in 1886 the Doctor of Laws. He died Christmas Eve, 1918, and is buried in the priest’s section at St. Mary Cemetery in the city's Lawrenceville neighborhood. His headstone is in the shape of a large open book.