ST. JOHN THE EVANGELIST (1910)

Like so many Colorado towns, Stoneham was a child of the railroad, platted in 1888 when the Burlington line reached its first section stop in eastern Weld County. In tiny Stoneham, the even tinier Catholic community built one of the loveliest of all the white churches on the Colorado high plains.

John Dugan, Alphonse Bethscheider, and Ernest Chockaert spearheaded organization of the parish in 1910, as a mission tended by Father Peter Stausse of Sterling, thirty miles to the east. Masses were held on the first Friday of every month in the home of John Dugan, proprietor of Dugan's Cash Grocer & General Merchandise, then moved to roomier quarters in the Stoneham School. Attendance exceeded all expectations, leading the congregation to build St. John the Evangelist Church in 1916.

Belgian, German, and Irish church members constructed a drop-sided frame church with Gothic windows and an enclosed bell tower. Inside, frosted glass windows shed soft light on plaster walls with plaster of Paris stations of the cross and a large statue of St. John the Evangelist (donated by John Dugan) over the altar tabernacle. According to the 1939 WPA church survey, other furnishings were wooden, with stained oak used for the pews and communion rail. The double sash windows could be opened in summer in hopes of catching a cool breeze, while a pot-bellied coal stove warmed the congregation in winter.

After repeated requests from Dugan and other parishioners who offered to help buy the house next to the church for a rectory, Bishop Tihen assigned Leo Patrick as a resident pastor in 1926. Then the depression, drought, and dust storms struck. Grasshopper plagues and the shooting of John Dugan contributed to the plight of Stonehamites, who came to St. John's, where they could ponder the large painting by the altar--"The Agony in the Garden."

During the early 1930s, Bishop Vehr wrote to Father Patrick to point out that St. John's owed $183.93 to Will & Baumer Candle Company, America's oldest and largest church candlemaker. Furthermore, the diocese had received complaints that the priest was in arrears with others, ranging from a Stoneham shoe repairman to the church's insurance company. Father Patrick replied, in a letter dated November 17, 1931:

The railroad has discharged all its help from this section. There is no organized charity here because we never needed it before, nor is there any possibility of raising funds hereabouts. There were three churches here and now only the Catholic Church remains. . . . Many of these people are in desperate shape, but their pride will not allow them to become county charges.

By 1950, Stoneham counted only 322 survivors, half the 1930 population. Despite the decline, St. John's had clung to its resident priest. Norbert J. Walsh, pastor from 1946 to 1951, reported that parishioners showered him with free coal and pheasant hunting possibilities. During the 1980s, withering wheat and land prices left many farmers bankrupt. One frustrated fellow crashed through the front window of a Greeley bank on his tractor, which the bankers were repossessing.

In 1986, Archbishop Stafford, hoping to comfort farmers and get acquainted with the agricultural hinterlands of the archdiocese, visited the carpenter Gothic landmark in Stoneham, by then a mission tended from Brush. Kneeling with eight children at the altar of the seventy-year-old white clapboard church, the archbishop comforted Stoneham's flock with the prayer: "Dear Lord, we especially want to pray today for the farmers and their families in these hard times. May all their hopes and dreams be fulfilled."