St. Mary's Catholic Church Historic District

About this property

St. Mary's Catholic Church is a parish of the Archdiocese of Dubuque. The church is located in Guttenberg, Iowa, United States. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as St. Mary's Catholic Church Historic District. In addition to the church, the historic district includes the parish rectory, convent, and school building. The parish was established in 1851. The parish's first church building was a 20-by-28-foot (6.1 by 8.5 m) frame structure built in 1851 on the north side of town. A 30-by-50-foot (9.1 by 15.2 m) brick church was constructed two years later and the original frame church was converted into a school. Plans to replace it began in 1865, but disagreements about where to build it doomed the effort. Eventually, it was decided to relocate the parish property and a new stone church was completed in 1874. The Rev. Joseph Brinkman became the pastor in 1889. He had been instrumental in the construction of the Basilica of St. Francis Xavier in Dyersville, Iowa. Brinkman designed a new school (1894), rectory (1899), and the present church (1904). Parishioners had determined that the school building was too small. The 50-by-70-foot (15 by 21 m) Colonial Revival structure was completed for $8,000, and the old school building was converted into a convent. Soon after the roof of the frame rectory started to deteriorate and it had other problems. A building committee of parishioners decided not to waste money on the old house. The new 42-by-34-foot (13 by 10 m) residence was completed for $3,500. It is a two-story, brick Colonial Revival structure with Italianate influences. The old rectory was moved to a different lot in town. Complaints about lack of space in church went back as far as 1892. Brinkman suggested adding a side wing onto the 1874 structure, but the parishioners decided a new church was feasible. Groundbreaking took place in 1902 and the church was completed in 1904. The lack of architect fees was a huge savings to the parish in their desire to expand their parish plant. In 1921 a wing was added to the south side of the school building to house, not only increased enrollment, but an expansion to ten grades. Brinkman had planned to build a new convent to replace the aging former school building the Franciscan Sisters continued to occupy, but he died unexpectedly on October 11, 1925. His successor, the Rev. Joseph A. Dupont, set to work immediately to provide an adequate home for the Sisters. This time a trained architect, Carimir Ignatius Krajewski from Dubuque, was chosen to design the new $13,545 Tudor Revival residence that was completed in 1926. The old convent was torn down.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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