GUARDIAN ANGELS (1911)

In 1911, the Benedictines of St. John the Baptist in Longmont established a new parish in Mead, which is ten miles northeast of Longmont and forty miles southeast of Greeley. This Weld County hamlet, named for Martin S. Mead, who first homesteaded there around 1886, became a town in 1905 when the Great Western Sugar Company built a railroad spur and sugar beet dump there. Paul Mead, son of Martin Mead, replatted forty acres of the old family homestead as the townsite.

Beginning in the 1870s, Bishop Machebeuf and other circuit-riding priests said Mass in what would become Mead, in the home of Thomas O'Donnell. By 1910, Mead claimed 114 residents, including twenty-five Catholic families living in and around the town, who bought the old Mt. Zion United Brethren Church. They dragged this church a mile down county highway 7 to its present crossroads location, refitted and rechristened it as Guardian Angels Church, then celebrated their first Mass there on January 1, 1911.

Vigorous growth characterized Mead and the church during the prosperous first two decades of the twentieth century. Standing-room-only Masses led the parish to construct an addition to the rear of Guardian Angels in 1929, doubling its size.

Guardian Angels was tended by the Longmont Benedictines until 1945, when it became a mission of St. Theresa's in Frederick. In 1964, the congregation built a parish hall next to the church and, two years later, the little flock of about seventy-eight people moved their Sunday Mass out of the tiny church and into the hall. The resident pastor of St. Theresa's in Frederick visits Mead every Sunday and reported in 1988 that his small but dedicated congregation in Mead is now hoping to raise $10,000 to restore and update the old church. This example of carpenter Gothic architecture is one of the most charming of the many white frame churches that grace the Colorado high plains.