Wexford Wooden Church

Father Hoare and the early immigrants arrived at Wexford, Iowa to an area covered with dense, heavily forested, pristine trees, with scenery much different than that of native Ireland. The density of the forest was remarkable, including vast tracks of massive intact woodlands. The type of trees varies by location. Sites with north-facing slopes contain maples, basswood, and birches.  South-facing slopes and riverbanks supported a mix of oaks (red, white, and burr) and hickories (shellbark, shagbark, mockernut, pignut, and bitternut). The riparian and bottomland supported a mix of black walnut, butternut, elm, ash, and cottonwood. The trees and heavy foliage retained the water on the hillsides, minimizing the risk of flooding.

Big John Collins was the oldest son of Timothy Collins who came to the Wexford area in 1852. In 1904, an older John Collins reflected on how the area looked when he was young. Everything was covered with trees. The scenic beauty and rolling wooded hills, in great measure, gives the county the look and name as the Switzerland of Iowa. New arrivals would throw up temporary shelter, either soddies or tar paper shacks, while they built a cabin. There were plenty of trees to choose from to cut and build a cabin. They had to remove tree stumps to free up small plots of soil to plant corn, potatoes, wheat, and vegetables. They fenced the clearings in with rails to keep any animals that roamed free out.

In the autumn, the settlers enjoyed the change of the season as the bright green leaves changed to a rainbow of colors, with a wide variety of reds, yellows, and browns. The landscape transformed into incredibly beautiful scenery that far surpassed even the best renditions of the most skilled artists.

On 11 & 12 November 1852, the settlers observed brilliant colors in the night skies as a solar storm disrupted the earth’s geomagnetic lines resulting in northern lights (aurora borealis) similar to what was seen in northeast Iowa on 11 & 12 November 2025. This natural phenomenon occurs when charged particles from the sun strike the earth’s atmosphere producing vivid colors and moving glows as the particles from the sun interact with earth’s magnetism.

The second church was a frame structure using local lumber cut at nearby sawmills. Construction of the wooden church started in 1856 and finished in late 1857 to early 1858. This church was also dedicated to St. George and doubled the seating capacity of the original log church. The finished church was comparable to St. Pius at Cherry Mound. Father Walsh was the pastor and had the honor of saying the first Mass in the new wooden church that was built with an earthen basement beneath.



The congregation at Wexford rapidly increased in number and the wooden church was again crowded with every pew full. On a fateful Sunday, an especially large number of parishioners attended a memorial Sunday Mass. The large size of the congregation caused the wooden floor in the church to give way, dumping many of the parishioners into the earthen basement. Poor old Mrs. Thornton, who was boisterous, large in stature, and quite a bit overweight, yelled in exasperation with the efforts of friends and neighbors to free her “Leave me be. You are bruising me!” Luckily, there were no other parishioners seriously hurt in the collapse.

The collapse of the floor necessitated the building of a newer, bigger church which could hold the growing population of Wexford. The people of Wexford wanted to make sure that any future church would be able to stand the rigors of time and hold a larger congregation. The parish council met and decided to build a slightly larger church made of limestone rock quarried from the hills in the Wexford valley.