Holy Cross Church, Rectory and School

About this property

Holy Cross Church is a historic church of the Diocese of Columbus located in the Discovery District neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio. The Gothic Revival building was completed in 1848 and is the oldest church in Columbus. The church, along with the school and rectory also on the property, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. The parish was suppressed and its territory absorbed by St. Joseph Cathedral in 2023, but remains open for public Masses. During the early 1800s, the first Catholics in Columbus were visited only occasionally by traveling priests of the Dominican Order. When Father Thomas Martin, OP visited Columbus on May 15, 1833, a group of five local landowners (Samuel and Margaret Crosby, Nathaniel and Caroline Medbury, and Phoebe Otis) met with him and proposed to gift property at Fifth and Walnut streets to the Catholic Church provided that a church building be constructed and in use within five years’ time. That building, Saint Remigius Church, was dedicated on April 29, 1838. Measuring at just 55 feet long and 30 feet wide, Saint Remigius Church was planned as a temporary place of worship that would later be turned into a school. The pastors at Saint Remigius also served the Catholics in neighboring cities in addition to the parish's own primarily German congregation. Father William Schonat became the first resident priest in 1843, the same year the first rectory at the site was finished. By then, the growing Catholic population in Columbus necessitated a larger church building. At Father Juncker's request, the parish was renamed “Holy Cross”. The present structure was completed and consecrated by bishop John Purcell on January 16, 1848, just as Irish immigrants began to arrive in Columbus to escape the Great Famine. This influx of migrants eventually split off to form Saint Patrick Church, though they continued to share Holy Cross while the new church was being built. A fire in June 1877 burned most of the high altar and caused $20,000 of damage. Following repairs, bishop Augustus Toebbe of the Diocese of Covington rededicated the church in 1880. Columbus native and humorist James Thurber resided in the neighborhood around Holy Cross in his childhood, and made reference to its clock and bell in his works. A frame school for the parish - the first parochial school in Columbus - was built in 1843, and initially staffed by lay teachers. In 1856, Fr. Casper Borgess, the pastor of the church, brought Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur from Cincinnati to teach, the first religious women to teach in the city. The Sisters of Notre Dame left in 1961 after the closure of the school making their tenure at Holy Cross the longest in the community's history in the United States. Beginning in 1872, the boys of the parish were taught by Marianist brothers from Dayton. The enrollment of the school peaked at about 450 students early in the 1900s, declining following World War I.

Location

Categories

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.

More in Franklin County

Historic places, battles, and census history across Franklin County.

More historic places in Ohio

Browse all historic places in Ohio.

Conflict records

Explore 19,000+ military engagements across American history.

Ohio history

Colonial settlement, territorial period, and statehood narrative.