St. Patrick’s Old Rock Church Plans Modified Picnic This year / Carry Out Meals With Tables Set up for Outdoor Dining

St. Patrick’s Old Rock Church will revise its annual third Sunday in August homecoming picnic, Aug. 15 but has modified the famous fried chicken and roast beef dinner to Drive Through and Carry Out.

Tables will be set up throughout the picnic grounds and the Preservation Society will offer water, soda and beer.

Cost of the dinners will be $13. Dinners of either chicken or beef will come with all sides and no substitutions.

After cancelling the popular picnic last year due to COVID, the Preservation Society was determined to have a modified picnic this year.

“We hope to return to having games and music next year,” the Society said in a letter to supporters and veteran picnic attendees.

The picnic organizers are looking for volunteers to help with picnic grounds preparation on Thursday and Saturday, Aug. 5 and 7, picnic setup on Aug. 14, picnic day, Aug. 15 and clean up on Monday, Aug. 16.

The traditional picnic workers gathering with cocktails and dinner is scheduled for Saturday, Sept. 11.

For more information, email [email protected]

Author: paulinemasson

Pauline Masson, editor/publisher. View all posts by paulinemasson

2024 Banner Year
For Rock Church Picnic

The annual St. Patrick’s Rock Church picnic is the only source of revenue for the church that was abandoned as a parish in 1925. The St. Patrick of Armagh Preservation Society launched the modern picnics in 1973 to mimic the harvest picnics that were held here in the 1870s. Modern picnics have poured almost a million dollars into restoration of the former parish church, cemetery and grounds.

The August 18, 2024 picnic was the most lucrative ever, serving dinners to 1,851 adults and 132 children, taking in $76,339 and netting a profit of $39,636 that will go into church upkeep. That was almost double the 2023 picnic that took in $57,935 and netted $20,542.

“It was unbelievable,” David Murphy, Preservation Society president said. “I think it was partly the perfect weather, and people didn’t leave right after they ate. They stayed and stayed. People stayed into the evening.

“This year funds will be spent to replace guttering on the church that caused a leak that damaged part of the interior wall of the church. That damage will be repaired and will make major repairs the priests house,” Mr. Murphy said.

Since 1973, St. Patrick’s picnics have had $1,656,771 in revenue and netted $913,312 in profits that went toward church and grounds restoration, along with untold numbers of hours of volunteer labor.
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Tales of the Woods
By Walter Schlemper

In Missouri in the middle of the last century, coon hunting was a popular activity. Some people hunted coons just for the pure joy of it.

Local resident Walter Schlemper, who gained a certain local celebrity with his mules, wrote a delightful memoir about the years when he and his brother Richard, and their friends the Vieman brothers spent their free time hunting coons. They were respectful, competent boys, who convinced their father that they needed a coon dog. Hunting was one of the few forms of recreation available to young men in their rural community. The book takes the reader through hunts on long cold nights with the Vieman brothers and a series of beloved coon dogs.

Mr. Schlemper wrote this part memoir part how-to coon hunting book so that his children and grandchildren and children and grandchildren of the Vieman brothers could have a memory of coon hunting that requires a man to use his resources and in return gives him a sense of accomplishment that would last a lifetime.