If you look to the west halfway between the Bevington and Cumming exits on Interstate 35 south of Des Moines, you will see St Patrick’s Church on the ridge above you.  The area used to be called Irish Settlement.  Someday it will be called West Des Moines.  It’s true it could be called West Cumming or North Bevington, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

On this site stood a Catholic church before there was ever one in Des Moines.  In fact, when Fr. Timothy Mullen made Irish Settlement his base in 1852, the next closest priest was in Ottumwa, giving Mullen, and in effect the Parish, an area the size of the current Des Moines Diocese to cover.

Much of the history of the place is owed to one single account of James Gillaspie, a Civil War Veteran, who wrote his recollections down in an article for the Madison County Historical meeting held on March 19, 1907.  He was 77 years old at the time.  He came to the area in 1856 with his parents at the age of 26.  Whether he had much of a memory or gave much an account, no one knows.  He waited to start talking until he was the last one left, however, and this is astute.

His written account was in the process of being lost, I suppose, when in 1956, to mark the hundredth anniversary of the Parish, Fr. John Hart began to put together a more formal history of the place and used Gillaspie’s article as a starting point.  As he branched out to other archives and histories, he found they were celebrating the 100^th a few years too late.  Fr. Hart’s history and, thanks to him, Gillaspie’s are still in circulation today.

In his account Fr. Hart makes no mention of his own name, neither as the account’s author, nor even as the Parish’s current priest.  He’s pays particular attention to the facts, and makes a great effort to demonstrate why those facts are so.  This all serves to make it a good account, but not a very Irish one.  I will retell the story of the founding here, in a more Irish fashion at times, with no malice towards the work of Fr. Hart.

Irish settlers had begun to arrive in the area in the late 1840s.  Hardly any of them were from Ireland directly.  Instead they hailed from New York, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Canada.  The settlement was hardly planned.  The first people probably stopped because North River and its timber made the area particularly attractive.  The later ones stopped because their children kept asking ‘are we there yet?’, and mom and dad decided they had heard enough of that so they were.

The settlement laid on both sides of the river, which led to them being at odds with one another when they finally took up the task of building a church.  Each wanted it on their side. The south siders were motivated by pride, the north siders were motivated by condescension. It wasn’t uncommon for a home on the south side to have a wagon out back, sitting up on blocks.  The common wagon of the period was a Camaro.  The south siders took pride in this.  The north siders were disgusted.

They reached an agreement which said the church would be built on whatever side of the river started a cemetery first.  The south siders, to their credit, were patient to wait.  The north siders looked for volunteers but couldn’t find any.

Anyhow the story goes that early in 1852, a government surveyor was returning from farther west.  He was ill and stopped at the house of Patrick Walsh, who lived on the south side.   Not long after stopping he died, and Mr. Walsh and a few of his neighbors set out to find a suitable place on their side of the river to bury him.

In their efforts they dallied, the exact cause of this is unknown.  There are no Walshes in the area any longer, and that fact gives us ample room to speculate.  Generally, just a little room to speculate is more than plenty for the Irish.  Let us speculate together.

After having relieved the former surveyor of the whiskey bottle the men found in his satchel, and having properly lamented the loss of their quite recent, but dear, old bosom friend, they then set out to find the suitable spot previously mentioned.  It was a matter of stumbling mostly.  Most of the whiskey had still been in the bottle when they found it.

(While we are in the process of speculating, then, it would be an interesting aside to note the difference between German and Irish settlement of the state.  Germans had it all planned out beforehand.  They saw the ridge, placed the town on the ridge, and placed the buildings in the town before there was a building or settler even there.  The Irish sense of planning was considerably more immediate.

At Irish Settlement the number of Catholic families dwarfed the number to be found in Des Moines.  Mullen found only 8 on his first visit to the town, but they were 8 German families, and they went on to help produce a state capital.  The Irish were sprawled out all over the country side, never once thought of building a town, and still haven’t today.  Had it not been for figuring out what to do with our late surveyor, they might not have ever got around to building a church.)

The one thing the Irish could do, however, was spread a story, and the death of the surveyor was a hot topic.  So hot, that enough on the north side found out about it in time to organize, cross the river, and relieve Walsh of the surveyor while his party was still out stumbling through the countryside.  They brought him back and buried him on the first ridge they came to.  The debate ended, and a church of logs was built there that summer.  This last paragraph is not speculation, it’s part of an oral history that was first written down by none other than Gillaspie himself.

The log church they built stood in the middle of what is today the cemetery at St. Patrick’s.  As was their custom, the Irish tended to bury their dead right outside the door.  Probably because the pallbearers got tired of other pallbearers asking, ‘are we there yet?’

The early graves were marked with plain wooden crosses and with no good accounting.  A few years later an effort was to be made to better identify the grave sites.  The night before this was to begin a fire swept through the cemetery, and the markers were lost.

Many thought they would be able to locate the graves of their loved ones, but found the blackened landscape held little resemblance to that which had existed prior.  Only some of the most recent graves were found, and today the earliest marked grave in the cemetery bears the date of 1857.

So it came to pass the oldest grave, which was of one who found and founded, now lies lost.

In 1868 Fr. Brazill decided the parish was in need of a new, larger church, and began construction on the one which still stands today.  Evidently unimpressed with the Irish craftsmanship on display in the log church, he hired carpenters out of Des Moines to build it.  They were going to use milled lumber in its construction at which the locals scoffed.  They maintained logs were the only proper way to build anything, and that milled lumber was a fad.  During construction, with the new walls in place, a storm came up and knocked them flat.  I feel bad for the carpenters, for it’s a dangerous thing to have the Irish proven right on anything.  It only encourages them.  I’m sure from that point forward the locals’ advice moved way past the realms of construction, and broadened in scope to the point where even philosophy was breathless.

Still the carpenters continued on, and St. Patrick’s has seen a lot of storms since.  Evidently, they were German.