The churches as buildings: one named architect, one church that left by rail

1838–2024

The Religion section owns the congregations; this article owns their buildings, and the buildings' record runs from a named architect in 1838 to a fiberglass steeple in 1968. Hamilton Methodist, the township's first church building, is also its first attributed one: Howard names its architect, Oliver Emery — the only architect the record assigns to any building in the township's whole history, the district's "Unknown" line notwithstanding — and the building itself is gone, its site tableted in 1965, its date argued among the records the Religion section prints (erected 1838 on the tablet; built 1839–1840 in Howard; dedicated May 1841 in Chapman). St. Stanislaus at Terre Coupee gives the file its fullest building biography, from the parish's own history. The first church was wood, sixty feet by thirty, raised in 1884 on the ground that is now the parking lot north of the present church: cornerstone dedicated Sunday 31 August 1884, the church dedicated 12 October 1884, total cost 1,800 dollars, its lumber donated by the sawmill owner Fred Miller. It served afterward as the school until it burned in 1908. Its successor is the present church, Gothic in style and brick: cornerstone laid Sunday 30 August 1903, walls up by 1904, the brickwork, roof and finishing carried through 1906 by a parish that built much of it with its own hands, its window glass hauled from Michigan City by horse and wagon, stained glass behind the altar in before dedication, six more stained-glass windows added in 1947 and four more donated the same year — two of them war memorials, to Sergeant Joseph Kuspa and Private Stanley C. Wichlacz, both dead in the Second World War. Around it the parish built a rectory in 1889–90 (a second followed under a later pastor), a parish hall in 1963–64 a hundred thirteen feet by sixty at seventy thousand dollars, a rock-garden grotto behind the rectory in the early 1940s, and a Religious Education Center of nine classrooms and six thousand square feet in 1983 — and once, famously for a building file, it re-roofed its tower in plastic: on 11 October 1968 a new steeple of fiberglass, thirty-seven square feet in section and four tons in weight, was lifted into place over the old one's termites and leaks. The rest of the township's sacred fabric prints at pointer size: Olive Chapel's 1869 chapel on section 11 and its congregation's present worship in a restored space, the exact continuity of site between them undocumented in the record read; the United Methodist pair in town — the brick predecessor of 1859, demolished in 2024, and the present church at 300 East Compton Street; and this section's most remarkable building, St. Mary's Episcopal, which survives by leaving: raised here in the 1880s, it was moved by rail in 1915 into East Chicago and bricked into the Church of the Good Shepherd there, a New Carlisle building standing in another city, its full course in the Religion section and its departure entered again, as both loss and survival, in the demolition ledger below.

Sources

1. St. Stanislaus Kostka Parish, parish history page — the building biography, read whole and first-hand.
2. Howard (1907) — Oliver Emery, architect of the Hamilton church.
3. This build's Churches & Religion — the congregations' courses, the Hamilton building-date conflict, the Olive Chapel caveat, and St. Mary's removal.