“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.
