A Catawissa Group That Saw Women As the Heart of Rural Life Is Still Active After 102 Years

By Pauline Masson – 

When a Catawissa Women’s Group first met in 1921, Catawissa was a railroad boom town, St. Patrick’s Rock Church was still an active parish and Frisco Railroad crews serviced a dozen passenger and freight trains a day that stopped at the bustling hamlet’s railroad depot.

Today the town of Catawissa is a remnant of its former self, but descendants of the 1921 ladies’ group, now calling themselves ‘Catawissa Ladies,’ along with more recent immigrants continue to meet once a month to talk about what is happening in the community and dine on samples of their best recipes.

A major topic of the September 12 luncheon meeting at the Pacific Knights of Columbus hall was the unbelievable success of the 2024 St. Patrick’s Rock Church annual picnic, the annual fundraiser of a church that was abandoned as a parish 1925.

I first wrote about the Catawissa women’s group in 2007. Two members of the group, sisters Wilma Eime Sam and Laura Eime McKeever were symbolic of the history of Catawissa. Although they were Protestant they had a unique tie to the Catholic community of  St. Patrick’s. 

In the first decades of the 1800s there were no churches and no ordained ministers of any denomination in the rural area South of the Meramec River. The sisters’ grandfather Eime bought a farm that had a stone house on it. In a gesture that would forever define Catawissa, the Protestant Mr. Eime offered overnight lodging and meals to Catholic priests on horseback who came to shepherd the rural Catholics. Mr. Eime welcomed Catholic and Protestant neighbors to visit the traveling priests.

In 2007 the ladies’ group was known as the Catawissa Friends Group. Ms. Sam and Ms. McKeever told me that the club played a long and active role in the evolution and modernization of this unincorporated farm community. Neighbors relied so heavily on each other that local lore says the Catholic priest met with families of all denominations, baptized, blessed and married worshipers and said Mass in the stone house of the Eime family.

Wilma Sam’s daughter, Kathy Scanlon, is a member of the current Catawissa Ladies. She said the stories of the priests staying in the family’s rock house is well known in the family. Ms. McKeever told me the stone house had been built with stones carved out of the nearby quarry that also supplied the stones for St. Patrick’s.

“We know the Friends Club is real old,” Ms.Sam told me. “Our mother was a member when we were small.”

Originally – in 1921 –  the club was the called the c

“It was basically a farm women’s educational group,” Ms. McKeever said. “They held classes on all types of things, from sewing and cooking to kitchen gardening and good health.”

Although no documents survive to record the Catholic Mass in the Eime home, the Protestant Eime family was forever tied to the rural Catholic parish and the two sisters and their children were among the volunteers at the annual St. Patrick’s homecoming picnic each August. For three decades Ms. Sam and Ms. McKeever worked the carryout window at the annual picnic.

“We have relatives in the cemetery,” Ms. Sam said.

The WPFA was crucial to the families during World War II when most things were rationed and every family faced shortages of needed items, according to Ms.McKeever

“It was time when you had to make do,” she said. “And they shared ideas of what worked best.”

The WPFA affiliated with the federated women’s clubs. Once each year the members made the pilgrimage to Sedalia to attend the State Fair. They exhibited their canned items and needlework and entered their best items in competition. When the Eime sisters were small they were allowed to go along.

“Mr. (Walter) Kommer had a big old farm truck that he hauled stock in,” Ms. McKeever said. “He would clean it all out and put hay bales in for seats and we would all ride to Sedalia together.”

If the club was originally about things that families needed, a greater benefit might be the friendships that were forged through the years as the women met once a month to help each other, according to Ms. Sam.

“When they really didn’t need the WPFA anymore and they got ready to disband it, some of the women didn’t want to stop meeting so they formed the Catawissa Friends Group,” she said. “And we’re still meeting every month except January and February.”.

At that time the dues were only $2 a year. Today yearly dues of the Catawissa Ladies are $10. The group meets the third Thursday of the month at the KC hall.

Bonnie Leach, Catawissa Ladies president, who built  house directly across Rock Church Road from the church allowed picnic crowds to park in the field in front of her house until the Preservation Society purchased ground and expanded the parking area.

Today the Catawissa Ladies see St. Patrick’s – no longer a Catholic parish church – as a Catawissa landmark that brings thousands of visitors a year to Catawissa.

“It has become more a community center,” Ms. Scanlon said.

Community is still the key topic as modern Catawissa Ladies meet each month. The round-table reports and conversations touchs on the events and people that shape modern Catawissa. And, as a September guest, I can attest that the carry-in casseroles and desserts are memorable. 

I took along a 1948 photograph of the Catawissa women that local history buff Bill McLaren shared with me. One of the ladies in the picture is his grandmother. He is not 100 percent sure he can identify his grandmother, but he recalled that – a decade or more after this photo was taken – when he was a boy, his grandmother took him along to the ladies’ meetings. He doesn’t recall what the ladies talked about, but he still remembers the pot-luck meals. “The food was great,” he said.

_{Members of the 1948 Catawissa branch of the Women’s Progressive Farm Association (WPFA.).} – _{Bill McLaren photo}

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