St. Patrick Church

About this property

St. Patrick Church is located in Imogene, Iowa, United States. It is a Catholic parish church in the Diocese of Des Moines. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983. Irish immigrants began to settle this part of southwestern Iowa in 1869. The town of Imogene was incorporated ten years later. New Melleray Abbey near Dubuque, Iowa settled young Irish men in nearby Mills County to tend their herds of Black Angus cattle. After the cattle market went under the men stayed in the area to extend the railroad into this part of Iowa. The Rev. Gerald Stack arrived in 1876 to serve the Catholics in the area. He celebrated Mass in a schoolhouse southwest of Imogene. The first Mass in town was celebrated in the home of John Delehant. Father Stack organized St. Patrick's in 1880 as a mission of St. Mary's parish in Shenandoah, Iowa. At the time all of the state of Iowa was in the Diocese of Dubuque. A frame church was built in Imogene for $1,800 in 1881. That year all of southern Iowa, including Imogene, was placed in the newly established Diocese of Davenport. The property for Mount Calvary Cemetery was purchased south of town in 1883. Father Ryan died the following February and was one of the first people buried in the cemetery. St. Patrick's became a parish in its own right in 1888 and the Rev. Edmund Hayes, a native of County Cork, was assigned as its first resident pastor the same year. Hayes was to have a profound effect on the parish and the town itself. He was referred to as the "best known Catholic priest in Iowa" and the "probably the best known minister in all southwestern Iowa of any denomination." Hayes was independently wealthy having inherited his wealth from his brother who had owned silver mines in Nevada and oil and gold in California. He invested a sizable portion of his wealth in Iowa farmland. A rectory was built soon after Hayes arrived and the original church was enlarged. It was replaced by a brick church in 1892 and a new rectory in 1904. A school, St. Patrick's Academy, was built in 1906. Hayes partially funded all of these projects himself. The parish became a part of the Diocese of Des Moines when it was established in 1911. The church was destroyed in a fire on February 12, 1915. The only items salvaged was the bell and the Pietà. Omaha architect Harry Lawrie designed the present church, which was built by Ed and Jack Sprague, also of Omaha. Work was begun in August 1915 and completed on March 20, 1919. During construction Mass and other services were held in the Hibernian Hall until they could be held in the basement of the new church. The first Mass was held in the church basement on October 29, 1916. The church was wired for electricity when it was constructed even though it was not available yet in Imogene. The Carrara marble high altar and side altars, as well as the baptismal font, were donated by Father Hayes as a memorial to his family. They were all valued at $60,000-$90,000. Hayes had gone to Pietrasanta, Italy to place the order himself. The altars that were erected in the church, however, were Hayes' second choice. The first was on a ship sunk by the Germans during World War I. It took two years for Italian sculptor Enrico Tonnegetti and his crew to assemble the altars. After the church's debt was paid off it was dedicated on March 17, 1924.

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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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