ST. MARY (1953)

Ault is a town of around 1,000 people, located in western Weld County ten miles north of Greeley. Founded in 1898, it was named for Alexander Ault, the principal grain buyer in the area. Although Dominic Morera, SF, pastor of Our Lady of Peace in Greeley, was tending sixteen other missions, he showed special concern for Ault. He established St. Mary mission there in 1953 and wrote to Archbishop Vehr in 1955:

Ault is the heart of the sugar beet district of Northern Colorado. There is a great percentage of Spanish-speaking people in the area. . . . The people are poor, many of them employed only during the summer months. Yet they spend $6,000 on the church.

Rewarding the generosity of the thirty-eight families of the Ault Mission, the Catholic Extension Society of Chicago donated $2,970 to help them acquire a one-room schoolhouse from the Ault School District. Father Morera and his flock then bought two lots of J.C. Romero's cornfield in northeastern Ault and moved the frame schoolhouse there before remodeling it into a 100-seat chapel, furnished with secondhand fixtures from other churches.

Over the years, that humble little frame chapel has evolved into a small but handsome brick-fronted church with almost 100 member families in 1988. Parishioners from Ault, Nunn, Pierce, and surrounding areas welcome the missionary ministry from Greeley's Hispanic oriented parish, Our Lady of Peace.