page_title: Holy Rosary Catholic Church (St. Marys, Ohio)
section_title: Growth
hierarchical_section_title: Holy Rosary Catholic Church (St. Marys, Ohio) / Growth
caption_attribution_description: Persistent URL: digital.lib.miamioh.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/pos... Subject: Catholic churches; churches; religion; steeples; religious education; Ohio--St. Marys; miami digital collections; bowden postcard collection
context_page_description: Holy Rosary Catholic Church is a Roman Catholic parish on the east side of St. Marys, Ohio, United States. Established in 1852, the church has been recognized for its historic 1860s church building, which was demolished amid a period of growth in the 1970s and replaced with a modernist structure.
context_section_description: By 1854, the parishioners built their first church, a log structure, and the parish's property was expanded with the purchase of land for a cemetery and a small rectory in 1861. By this time, growth in membership rendered the church too small for the numbers of worshippers, but the parish was too poor to erect a replacement. Under the leadership of Joseph Gregory Dwenger, the parish received encouragement from Archbishop John Baptist Purcell, and other churches in the Archdiocese of Cincinnati contributed significant amounts of money for construction; the parish finished its new church in 1867 at a cost of $12,000. Designed by Minster architect Anton Goehr, the new church was a simple rectangular brick structure with a bell tower, supported by a stone foundation. The original church was moved to the banks of the canal in downtown St. Marys.
  As the parish continued to grow into the 1880s, a bell was added to the church's steeple, and a rectory was built at a cost of nearly $3,000. Non-Catholics in the community paid nearly half of the cost of erecting the rectory. Increased wealth among the parishioners and growing anti-Catholic sentiment in the region resulted in the foundation of a parish school in 1902.
caption: Appearance circa 1910
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