St. Marys lies 30 miles northwest of Topeka on the banks of the Kansas River amid miles of corn and pasture land. From the very first, it was a place where dreams were made and broken. The town began in 1848 as a Jesuit mission for the Potawatomi, a tribe driven out of Indiana and forced to walk to Kansas, more than 600 miles, along what became known as the Trail of Death. Teske has designed more than 100 new houses, many large enough to accommodate families with 9 or 10 children. While the farm population has been shrinking for decades, that of St. Marys has grown.
Some newcomers are government employees and factory workers who commute to Topeka.
But the main attraction is a religious community established 20 years ago when the Society of St. Pius X, a schismatic Roman Catholic group, bought the Jesuit seminary and founded St. Marys Academy and College. The St. Pius families, committed to the old Latin mass, speak of the need to return to traditional ways, without television, without feminism, without welfare, without interference from the state. It is they who give the town the appearance of a small-town America that does not exist anymore. St. Pius members in and around the town have come to outnumber the people in St. Marys itself, many of whom belong to another large Roman Catholic church. The splits and silences between the two groups are often acute.