“Kick out the jams!“
Thanks to the eagle eyes of readers, I discovered that St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church once had an earlier location in Manchester. With the help of the Archdiocese, I was able to obtain photographs of that church, which was up Creve Coeur Avenue, which surprisingly a very historic street dating back to the earliest days of the town. The founding of the parish is shrouded in mystery, but seems to date back to the 1830s and was originally named St. Malachy’s, a name later given to a church in the Mill Creek Valley in St. Louis. The large Gothic Revival church you see above dates from 1893, and served the parish until 1959.
There were the usual buildings, such as a school and convent combination, as well as the rectory.
The rectory is still standing, and is privately owned.
The grotto seems to be gone, but the cemetery still exists.
Honestly, the church is hard to photograph!
New additions make it better to show old photographs to give the viewer a sense of how the building looks.
From 1960 to 1975, a new building that now serves as a community room functioned as the church, but in 1975, a new structure, which is still used today, was built according to designs of Mackey Mitchell. It features a huge bronze sculpture of the Tree of Jesse, and Emil Frei & Associates stained glass windows.
Thank you so much for this discovery! I had a sneaking suspicion this may have been the case. I will speculate that as the 40s/50s new subdivisions began to be developed in the area, the parish must have grown and faced with the need for a larger school (the church actually looks plenty large to me, maybe similar to Sacred Heart Florissant and Holy Cross), the parish either felt it was landlocked unable to buy surrounding parcels, or there was a benefactor with more land at the current location. I find it surprising the span of years between this building’s end and the current’s build. I wish this could have remained instead of the current church which is quite ugly in my opinion.
Yes, I imagine the membership of the parish exploded, much like Sacred Heart in Jennings.
The old church building was used as the kindergarten classroom until the 1965-1966 school year. During the school year, the kindergarten was moved to the new location. I was in that class.
Oh, interesting.
Please tell me what happened to the grotto of St. Joseph’s Manchester??