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French Catholic parish of the north side · organized 1846 · Washington Township ground inside the present city · active, November 2026
Founding: The oldest Catholic parish in Allen County after the cathedral parish itself stands not downtown but on the Auburn Road, where French Catholic immigrants settled in the 1830s in a district they called New France, or New Gaul. Mass was said in their homes first. The parish's own history names Father Julian Benoit — the builder of St. Augustine's in the city — as its founder: he was named the settlement's first pastor in 1843, and the first church, a small log building, went up in 1846 on the east side of the old Auburn Road. By the parish's count it is the first church built anywhere in the region outside the city itself.
Building line: The parish counts six churches. The 1846 log chapel was followed by a second log church before 1852; a brick church rose in 1904 at the corner of Auburn and Wallen Roads; a fifth church was erected across the street in 1968 — that building, decommissioned, stood for some thirty years as a seasonal haunted-house attraction and was razed by the diocese in 2008. The sixth and present church, built under Monsignor John Kuzmich, pastor 1984 to 2013, was dedicated in 2001; the parish stands today at 1502 East Wallen Road, with its cemetery on the historic Auburn Road ground.
Present state: Active. The parish's own account gives its growth in souls: 70 in 1900, 192 in 1946, 4,400 in 1968, 5,420 in 1974, and about 3,500 families served today. Its school opened in 1955. The religion record's silence about this parish is the gazetteer's largest single repair: a founding congregation of the 1840s, French where the city's other early parishes were German or Irish, that no earlier entry names.
Sources:
- St. Vincent de Paul Parish, "Our Parish" (parish history, saintv.org).
- History of Saint Vincent's Parish (parish centenary history, 1946; Internet Archive).
- Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana, church list and Washington Township churches page (organized 1846; church line; 2008 razing).
- Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Bishop D'Arcy tribute issue, Today's Catholic, 17 February 2013 (new church building listed 1998; dedication 2001 per the parish).