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“In 1873 the 27 families sent John Brost to ask Bishop John Hennessy for a resident priest and permission to build a church. Permission to build was granted, but no priest was available. The next year they dedicated the new church to the Blessed…

“State Center was at the end of its run for the Northwestern Railroad in the early 1860s bringing Catholic employees among the first settlers of that Marshall County Town. Among the priests making missionary journeys to State Center were the…

“Bishop John Hennessy established the Strawberry Point parish in the southwest corner of Clayton County in 1878 and appointed Father John Hackett pastor. They had been served by missionary priests coming into the area and celebrating Mass in the…

“In 1892 the Catholic pioneers judged their numbers were sufficient to build a church. That year they raised some money by means of a fair in the Cass Opera House. In August they began hauling rocks for the foundation. The church was a white frame…

“The first resident priest in Tama was Father Charles McCabe, arriving in 1873. He stopped there on a missionary journey and decided Tama was a better location for a church because of the larger community of Catholics and the railroad, which helped…

“Father Patrick Maginnis came from Garryowen in 1852 to be the first resident pastor in the county. That year he saw to the building of the first church, a small frame structure, planned to serve as both church and school, but there is no school…

“Once the Archbishop appointed a pastor for the Blessing parish, the blessing pastors occasionally visited the Catholics of the Traer area and celebrated Mass in their homes. In 1912 Father Sampson, pastor of Blessing, directed the building of Saint…

“Saint Mary Church at Spencer’s Grove, two and a half miles north of Urbana, “stood out in the prairie like a lonely sentinel of the Lord,” according to Father Hubert Holsters, writing in the Centennial History of the Archdiocese. For many years…

“The Catholic Church in Benton County began with the deeding of two sections of prairie near Keystone, Iowa, to the University of Notre Dame in Indiana in January 1863. Francis Murphy, a Benton county pioneer, gave those 1,280 acres in return for…

“After the appointment of Father P. C. Kenny, churches were constructed in Vinton and Dysart under his direction. In 1879 the Church of Saint Mary in Vinton was dedicated on the feast of Mary’s Maternity, October 12, and the church in Vinton was…