St. Mary of the Assumption expands after 112 years

Linda Jones

1/20/05 - One of Central City’s landmarks, the inspiring St. Mary of the Assumption Catholic Church, is expanding. Although the original church only cost $10,000 to build in 1892, the attached two-level addition and repairs are projected to cost $300,000. For the first time ever, the only Catholic Church in Gilpin County will have water and sewer!

  The 22’ x 41’ addition includes a multi-use room, a small kitchen, restrooms and an elevator to bypass the 15 stairs from Pine Street to the sanctuary level. The addition will be brick with Gothic windows to match the original building. Patching and repairing the plaster and woodwork in the sanctuary and updating the existing electrical system are also included in the goal amount. 

  To see this Victorian gem, look up and to the left as you drive up from Black Hawk. The steeple on the distinctive corner belfry keeps watch over Central City, and a carillon in the steeple can be heard throughout the town musically announcing each hour. Native granite and red brick were used in the construction of the church, and brilliant stained glass windows illuminate the interior. The church is 90 x 42 feet and seats nearly 400.

  Beloved pioneer Father Machebeuf celebrated the first Mass in the area in 1860 in the Sons of Malta Hall on Main Street. One woman in particular was delighted to have Catholic services in Gregory’s Diggin’s – Mary York, the first white woman in the gulch. When Father Machebeuf joined Mary and Sheriff Billy Cozens in marriage on December 30, 1860, it was the first wedding in Central City and the first Catholic wedding in northern Colorado.

  Theaters, saloons, even a dance hall, were used for monthly Masses in Central City.  Father Machebeuf pleaded with his parishioners for funds to build a church, but the offering plate never held enough to do that until he came up with an ingenious plan. At the end of a monthly Mass in a saloon, he announced that he had asked a co-conspirator to lock the door and no one could leave until they contributed funds to build a permanent place to worship. Of course, the saloon could not reopen until the Catholics departed, and the necessary funds for a church quickly filled the offering plate!

  The Catholics were able to purchase a two-story frame building at 135 Pine Street, where the present building stands, and it was remodeled into a church. Bishop Jean Lamy of Santa Fe came in 1861 to bless the new church, the first permanent building for any denomination in the mountain mining regions. Lamy wrote his superior, the Archbishop of St. Louis, “All these places form one street of crowded houses in the steepest gully you could imagine, three or four miles in length. Quartz mills, stores, shops, dwelling houses all mixed up. New mines are discovered every day.  It is certainly the most curious sight I ever saw.”

  On August 10, 1872, now-Bishop Machebeuf laid the cornerstone for a church seating 800, but that structure was almost completely destroyed in the Great Fire of 1874. Only the basement of the stone building remained; it was enclosed and services were held there until it was torn down in 1892 to make room for the new church. (If you wonder why the original church was planned to seat 800, remember that Central City was a larger town than Denver for several years.)                                                                        

  A drive up Eureka Street to the Cemetery District above Central City is a pleasant and popular pastime for visitors. Six of the county’s eleven cemeteries are here, including the Catholic Cemetery. This serene hillside was not always so quiet - in 1879 the Catholic Cemetery alone had 38 burials. Eleven of the deceased were under one year old, 30 were under 35, and four were “killed in a mine”.

  Father Honoratius Burion was the third pastor of St. Mary (1871-77) and beloved in the town. A street in Central City, not far from the church, is named for him. During his pastorate, the numerous Irish miners in the area donated a statue of St. Patrick and began calling the basement church St. Patricks, but Bishop Machebeuf insisted the official name of the archdiocese’s first mission remain St. Mary of the Assumption.

  The active Father Burion and the Bishop brought the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth to Central City in 1873. On the crown of Gunnell Hill, the nuns opened the St. Aloysius Select and Boarding School, an imposing $30,000 Gothic-revival style stone academy, crowned by a bell tower and Celtic cross. A handsome mansard-roofed house was built adjacent to the church for the sisters. On weekdays over a hundred children trudged up the steep slope on the 150 wooden steps to St. Aloysius, where six sisters were teaching. (In 1877 the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet took over the school.) As many as 700 Catholics attended Mass each week.

  As the population of Central City declined, so too did the number of parishioners. In 1917 St. Aloysius Academy and the convent closed. Nine years later the commanding Academy building was demolished, but its foundation is now an overlook and the original iron Celtic cross was erected as a monument to Ida Kruse McFarland. She attended the Academy, became a University of Denver English professor and the guiding light behind the restoration of the Central City Opera House. An opera patron, Helen Bonfils, restored St. Mary in the 1950s, and another opera supporter, Julie Penrose, rehabilitated the rectory as a private residence. 

  Ironically it is gaming that has brought a mini-economic Renaissance to Gilpin County and allows the beloved old church to finally expand north, as its original builders planned. The 53 families in the parish are already partway toward their goal, but they will need outside assistance. If you would like to help the parishioners in reaching their goal, please send your contribution to St. Mary’s, c/o Father Kerrigan at P O Box 848, Idaho Springs 80452. If you want to visit St. Mary, Mass begins at 10:30 every Sunday.