page_title: St. Michael's Catholic Church (Mechanicsburg, Ohio)
section_title: Organic history
hierarchical_section_title: St. Michael's Catholic Church (Mechanicsburg, Ohio) / Organic history
caption_attribution_description: English: Front of St. Michael's Rectory, located adjacent to St. Michael's Catholic Church at 40 Walnut Street in Mechanicsburg, Ohio, United States.
context_page_description: St. Michael's Catholic Church is a historic Catholic church in Mechanicsburg, a village in Champaign County, Ohio, United States. Completed in the 1880s, it served a group of Catholics who had already been meeting together for nearly thirty years. One of several historic churches in the village, it has been designated a historic site because of its well-preserved nineteenth-century architecture.
context_section_description: The first settlers in Goshen Township arrived circa 1805, and Mechanicsburg was platted on 6 August 1814.  Organized religion was rare in the earliest years; the first churches were established by circuit-riding preachers from the Methodist Episcopal Church, who founded small religious classes that met in settlers' log cabins.  Mechanicsburg's first church was a Methodist congregation organized in 1814, and by the 1880s the village boasted four Protestant churches: Baptist, black Baptist, African Methodist Episcopal, and Methodist Protestant.
  Champaign County's earliest Catholics were Irish immigrants, who came to the county seat of Urbana in the 1840s and 1850s as railroad laborers.  Viewed with suspicion by their neighbors both because of their nationality and their religion, they received the sacraments only occasionally from travelling priests before the establishment of St. Mary's Church in 1853.  Mechanicsburg's first Catholic families, who were also largely Irish, worshipped at St. Mary's or in nearby Rosedale; occasional Masses were said in Mechanicsburg by travelling priests until the congregation was attached to Our Lady of Lourdes parish in Marysville in 1872.
  Mass was first celebrated in Mechanicsburg in 1859, the parish was canonically erected in 1865, and it gained a more permanent organization in 1880.  By the end of the 1880s, the parish had witnessed the completion of its church building on Walnut Street.  In its earlier decades, the membership included many families who lived in the countryside surrounding Mechanicsburg, and the members' devotion to their church prompted a local author to declare them "extremely faithful in attendance on its services".  The parish obtained a rectory in October 1904; a woman who lived on Walnut Street died in that month, and her will included a provision donating her house for use as a rectory.  By 1917, the membership consisted of 38 families comprising 135 individuals.  The parish operated a Sunday school and multiple small groups for various activities, including a branch of the Society of the Holy Name.
caption: St. Michael's rectory, located next door to the south
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