St. Peter's Catholic Church - Historical Marker

Map Location

Maps detected!

---

This page uses Google Maps. The map will be loaded from Google-Server and some of your data may be used by Google. In order to see the maps, please click accept. You can also click here to see further information related to this.

Deny Accept

Categories:

Things to See,  Historical Markers/Interpretive Sign

Keywords:

• St. Peter's Catholic Church - Historical Marker

General info

Dismayed that his son’s adoptive home had no Catholic church, Frenchman Achille Wibaux instruct- ed Pierre to build one here. The rancher contributed $2,000 for the construction of this wood-frame, ver- nacular Gothic Revival structure. It was built in 1895 by R. R. Cummings and Eugene Blias of Glendive. The Wibaux congregation being at that time a mission of Miles City, Father Van der Broeck of Miles City superintended the church’s construction. In 1938, the church was enlarged and its exterior walls covered with scoria, a lava rock common to the badlands of the area. Father Leahy, pastor of the church beginning in 1931, conceived the idea of a scoria facing, and volunteers from the congregation went rock-picking in wagons and pickup trucks. Father Leahy recorded that “patient men did a beautiful job of laying the rock up to and on the steeple.” The building served as Wibaux’s Catholic church until 1965, when a new church was built and this building was converted to a catechism school.

Gallery