Presbyterian Welsh and Scots-Irish families settled along Welsh Run’s tributary of the West Conococheague Creek during the 1730s and 1740s, and in 1741 the Welsh Run community formed the Lower West Conococheague Presbyterian Congregation, an evangelical sect that separated from the older Upper West Conococheague Church. The new congregation built a log meeting house one mile north along an Indian path on the West Conococheague, first served by Rev. Dunlop and then by Rev. James Campbell eight years later. Before 1760, a raiding party of Western Delaware Indians burned the meeting house and temporarily disbanded the congregation, which reestablished itself and built a second log meeting house on the present site in 1774. Later called the White Church because of its board siding, that building had a central high pulpit with an elaborately carved sounding-board and space for a long communion table and seats with backs as high as the shoulders. Rev. Thomas McPherrin served from 1774 to 1799, and after a three-year absence Rev. Robert Kennedy led the church from 1802 to 1816 and again from 1825 to 1843; he was known for strong views on temperance, and local tradition held that he forbade alcohol on his nearby farm. After Kennedy’s death in 1843, the log church fell into disrepair and the congregation declined, but in 1871 his son Elias, living in Philadelphia, gave funds for a new church on the same site in honor of his father and also funded the Welsh Run Academy, a high school for girls run by the church, whose building still stands across Route 416. In 1875, Rev. Joseph H. Fleming, D.D., became the first pastor of the new church and founded the Welsh Run School for Girls; under his leadership the congregation grew and supported Sunday worship and a Sunday school with a library for children and young adults. After Fleming retired in 1891, the church was served over the next 58 years by Revs. William West, Roland Crist, William Pfoutz, John Diehl, George Rentz, Edward Snook, Lawrence Guthrie, and W.W. Dinsmore. The congregation bought a new pump organ in 1916 that remained in use, and in 1934 Sophie Fleming commissioned a stained-glass Tiffany window in the chancel in memory of her father Joseph, mother Margaret, and sister Tacy. After World War II the congregation again declined, leading to the church’s dissolution in 1962. In 1974 the Carlisle Presbytery took over the property, and thirty years later donated the church building and 1.4 acres to the Friends of the Robert Kennedy Memorial Presbyterian Church, a local nonprofit organized to preserve the church and adjacent cemetery. The present church, built in 1871 after the 1774 meeting house was dismantled, is a significant example of mid- to late-1800s Italianate ecclesiastical architecture, with ornate brackets under the roof eaves and ashlar wood siding, and it retains most of its original appearance except for a steeple lowered sometime after 1900 when the bell section was removed.