About Our Churches
St. Theresa's History
St. Mary’s History
St. Mary’s Parish History
Some parts taken from 2007 booklet
(1857 – 2007)
Beginnings
Founded in 1856 Saint Mary’s church has a rich history, and has played a vital role in the community of Mayville. The Rev. Father Rehrl, first missionary of all the old churches around the area, attended for many years. St. Mary’s Church had its official beginning on September 22, 1857 when a warranty deed to purchase land for a church was drawn up between Jacob Zervas, Joseph Schwartz, Anton Buchan, and Joseph Boehmer trustees of the Catholic Church Santa Maria bony conciliar of Mayville tone of Williamstown county of Dodge and state of Wisconsin parties of the first and John Martin Henni, Bishop of the city of Milwaukee party of the second part. On this deed, the church is given the title “Roman Catholic Church, Sanctae Mariae boni consilii of Mayville.” Thus, our parish was established under the patronage of St. Mary of Good Counsel. At that time, among the early settlers who took an active and earnest interest in the advancement of Catholic affairs were Messrs. Henninger, M. Ziegler, Boehmer and Schwartz.
Soon a small wooden church was built. When Mr. and Mrs. Henry Boehmer celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary in September 1897, it was noted that they were the first couple to be married in St. Mary’s church, so they would have been married the same month the deed was drawn up. That would mean the church was built in record time. Perhaps construction began before the deed was signed.
St. Andrew’s History
150 YEAR HISTORY
1849- 1999
LE ROY, WISCONSIN
This history was written and organized by Leonard Schraufnagel and printed in 1999 as a part of the 150 year celebration at St. Andrews. We all owe him our appreciation for the great amount of time he spent collecting the historical documents and information and then formatting it for the publication.
Leonard provided Microsoft Word files for all the pages in the book. These files were formatted into PDF documents that could be published to the internet on the St. Mary-St. Andrew parish website. The goal was to have the pages on the website appear as they do in the book. The web site information is divided into chapters to keep the files to a reasonable size for downloading from the web site. These chapters do not follow the table of contents from the book as they were based on a reasonable file size or a good location to end a chapter. The last chapter is information that was prepared after the book was published in 1999.