UPDATED: 5-15-2020

PARKERSBURG, WEST VIRGINIA:   A VINTAGE PORTRAIT

ST. XAVIER CATHOLIC CHURCH

St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church, shown here about 1910 (left) and in the 1930s (center), was erected in 1870, replacing an earlier church that had been built in 1847. St. Xavier is now Parkersburg's oldest church.

On April 28, 1847, Bishop Richard Whelan in Richmond, Virginia, paid $306 for a Parkersburg lot on Market Street for the purpose of building the town’s first Catholic church. Two years later, he wrote in his diocesan report that “a neat brick chapel is being erected at this point, which many circumstances indicate as one likely to become prominent on the Ohio River.” The local parish consisted of only twelve families.

However, the completion of the B&O railroad line from Grafton in 1857 brought an influx of Irish-Catholic immigrant workers to Parkersburg that swelled the church’s membership to over 300 people. Five years later, eight Sisters of the Visitation arrived in Parkersburg to establish the Visitation Academy for girls, which would later become DeSales Heights.

Following the Civil War and the creation of West Virginia, the new state diocese in Wheeling selected architect Patrick Charles Keely of New York to design a larger, more elaborate church to replace the simple chapel. The cornerstone was laid on May 9, 1869, and Keely’s Romanesque structure, with Gothic doorways, was completed a year and a half later at a cost of nearly $60,000. German artist Daniel Mueller painted several bright, bas-relief murals, as well as the vaulted ceiling, which the West Virginia Department of Culture and History now call “the most significant examples of ecclesiastical art in West Virginia today.” German artisan Joseph Daris handcrafted the decorative interior and exterior woodwork, including the white Gothic altar. The church was named St. Xavier.

Though the front bell tower was originally designed to stand 200 feet high, a financial shortfall stopped construction at 100 feet, and no money was left to buy a bell. That’s the way it stayed for the next 45 years. Not until 1915 did the parish install St. Xavier’s first bell—a bronze, 3,000-pounder that was christened “Catherine”—and replace the tower’s flat, makeshift roof with a proper dome. Two smaller bells from the same Baltimore foundry were added two years later and named “Brigid” and “Patrick” after the Irish saints. Today these three bells ring several times a day.

On June 1, 1895, a boat carrying 2,500 pounds of nitroglycerin to Burning Springs exploded on the Little Kanawha River and blew out all of St. Xavier’s original stained-glass windows except those facing Market Street.

On May 1, 1960, Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy attended early Sunday Mass at St. Xavier while staying at the nearby Blennerhassett Hotel during his successful West Virginia campaign tour that made him the Democratic nominee for President.

In 1978, St. Xavier, more familiarly called St. X by locals, was added to the National Register of Historic Places. It is Parkersburg’s oldest church building. Over the past twenty years the parish has extensively restored its artwork and murals and renovated the bell tower.

For further information, go to www.stx-pburg.org or read church historian Roger Nedeff’s Substantial Foundations A History of St. Francis Xavier Parish, which is free at Google books.