By Pauline Masson –
St. Patrick’s of Armagh, a Missouri limestone sanctuary built to serve Catholics in a remote corner of the Meramec River Valley opened its doors to all, creating a history defying blend of supporters that has survived 180 years.
Stonemasons recruited to build the church in the wilderness named the township that grew up around the stone church ‘Catawissa,’ in honor of their Pennsylvania home place. The first stones quarried nearby were laid here in 1859 to replace a deteriorating log church that had stood on a hill overlooking the Meramec since 1844. The church was completed after the end of the Civil War and held its first Mass on Easter Sunday 1866.
Catawissa was a land of small farms tilled by settlers from the eastern U.S. and Europe. Until the stone church was built, the only religious stewardship for Catholics and non-Catholics was provided by visiting priests on horseback, who turned no one away. It was a tradition that would survive to astound 20th and 21st Century St. Louis Archbishops. It also nurtured an annual August pilgrimages to this place by descendants of the first parishioners.
________________________________________________________
The historic church will host its annual homecoming picnic Sunday, Aug. 18. Free parking will be available on the church grounds. Cost for the family-style chicken and beef dinner is $17 for adults and $8 for children 4 to 12. All you can eat meals will be served buffet style from 11:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., with refills via servers.
________________________________________________________
On the day of the event, Mass is celebrted at 11:00 a.m., volunteers guide patrons to parkings spaces, man bingo tables, operate game, children’s and memorabilia booths, fry chickens, make homemade noodles, and for six hours they serve a steady stream of diners all they can eat.
I first became aware of St. Patrick’s in 1989, when, on a Sunday outing I made the drive along Rock Church Road in rural Catawissa and approached the yellow limestone church in full sunlight – with cars filling the open spaces on both sides of the road and families dressed as for a celebration walking toward the crowded church grounds. My mind fashioned an enchantment. The setting of this crisply maintained stone structure and the throng approaching it surely had a story to tell.
Inside the churchyard, shaded by four mature Maple trees, hundreds of people sat at huge bingo tables, bellied up to memorabilia counters, jostled each other to make their way through a crowd of smiling picnic goers and shouted greetings to friends or relatives not since last year’s picnic. Children played games at rows of game booths. Across the churchyard a line stretched the entire length of a long low building, waiting with numbered tickets to sit in the dining hall for a fried chicken or roast beef dinner complete with home made bread and a smorgasbord array of home made desserts.
It was easy to spot the workers in their Kelly green golf shirts with St. Patrick’s silk-screened on the back. I asked the lady in the first booth, just inside the gate, who all the workers were. Mostly descendants of souls in the graveyard she said. She lived in St. Louis and came to work at the picnic every year. But that year was special. Her sister and nieces had made the trip from California for the first time in 14 years.
The following July I telephoned William D. “Billy” Murphy, St. Patrick’s Preservation Society president and asked if he could help me with some modern church history. That began a 25 year dialogue on the adventures of restoring and preserving a country church that had been abandoned as a Catholic parish in 1925.
Harvest picnics, first held here in the 1870s, were abandoned as the congregation declined. In 1972 the modern Preservation Society reinstated the annual picnics as homecomings for descendants of former parishioners and with the hope of raising funds to restore the crumbling church and rectory and rework the overgrown cemetery.
Mr. Murphy and Bob Conley, who co-chaired the picnic, oversaw the annual gathering and a series of work projects that were funded with picnic profits. They said so many individuals and businesses, in one way or another, contributed to the architectural restoration of the former parish property it would be impossible to name them all.
It seems like a life-time ago that I first experienced St. Patrick’s picnic and the army of volunteers and returning descendants who show up each year to keep alive a tradition manned by generations of St.Patrick’s families.
They made $58.00 profit for the 1972 picnic but were not deterred. Year by year, the picnics grew and the two co-chairs hosted an after-picnic soiree for the workers to report picnic proceeds and what restoration projects they would be able to complete that year. At the 2013 recap party, Mr. Murphy and Mr. Conley reported that the combined annual picnic proceeds had topped $1 million that had all been poured back into the church and grounds.
The partnership between Billy Murphy, who died in May 2018, and Bob Conley, would impact the life of the abandoned parish for 45 years and spearhead the restoration of the parish complex into the showplace it is today.
Today Billy Murphy’s grandsons David Murphy, Preservation Society president Matt Pross, vice president and Bob Conley’s nephew Steve Conley, vice president keep the picnic alive and the volunteers energized.
St. Patrick’s was sanctified at the close of the Civil War when the far-flung farm families and recently immigrated railroad workers were forging a community. Father Philip Grace raised funds to start construction. Father Edward Berry, who presided there as pastor for 70 years, finished the work. The first Mass was celebrated on Easter Sunday in 1866.
Father Berry also served as pastor of St, Bridget’s church in Pacific, St. Columbkille church in Byrnesville, and St. Michael’s chapel that served the Sister’s of St. Joseph convent, later St. Joseph Hill Infirmary. Joseph McNamee in his book Pioneer Priests, recorded that Father Berry was a fine horseman who continued the ‘priests on horseback’ legend as he was frequently seen riding along the area farm roads to his other churches.
Still, at St. Patrick’s he found time to organize the first Preservation Society to maintain the cemetery that had begun interring former parishioners before the stone church was completed. He built a parish library building that housed 1,600 books that were loaned to parishioners and their Protestant neighbors. In the 1870’s he inaugurated the annual summer picnic, which, lasted all day and late into the evening, to cement community togetherness.
If I sound repetitious forgive me. But, I have to tell you . . . St. Patrick’s is unique among abandoned Catholic parishes thanks to the Murphy and Conley families.
The current Preservation Society was formed when the old parish was in poor condition. The rectory, known locally as the priest’s home, was listing off center by nearly a foot. The windows and doors of the stone church were crumbling. And the overgrown cemetery was maintained by work parties that were called on to cut a path to graves where descendants continued to be buried near family members.
