(Ed's Note: 'St. Pius Catholic Church, near White Sulphur, was built about 1820. Combs, Tarleton, Goff, Twyman, Greenwell, Harding and Frazier were prominent in building this church. There is a farm in connection with it, for its benefit and that of the pastor. When the church was built, it had a large membership of some two of three hundred families, but a present there are but twenty or thirty families belonging to it. Death and removals have depleted its numbers. It contains but six members now, that worshipped in it fifty years ago. The first church was a frame; the present one is an imposing brick structure.' )(excerpt from History of Scott County)
Sometime between 1786 and 1790 a group of Catholic families settled in the neighborhood extending some four or five miles creekwise from the Forks of Elkhorn Creek. This rich and coveted watershed drew this party of Maryland emigrants apart from the majority of their fellow Catholics who were moving to Kentucky in those years following the Revolutionary War.
Established in 1793-94, the parish was called St. Francis, and was the second catholic church started in Kentucky. The church served as the mission center for all of eastern Kentucky for many years.
The first few decades of the parish could be characterized by constant growth, dispute over ownership of church property and pastoral leadership of the congregation. By 1820, construction of the parish's first and only church was complete, along with a new name, St. Pius.
Around 1819, Father Samuel Montgomery took over charge of the parish. He proposed the congregation get on with its long-delayed plans of construction of a church. The project was begun with eagerness and when completed in 1820 had a cost of $3600.
Generally the barter-style currency of the Kentucky country at the time was tobacco, but at St. Francis Church it seemed to be pork. Financial pledges were affixed to a document which read: "We the undersigned agree to advance whatever money and pork may be needed to pay workmen -- the same to be returned to us in rent of pews, each of us to pay one-tenth in money and the
The Sisters of Charity of Nazareth began to operate a fairly successful village school around this time and Father Francis Kendrick served as pastor starting around 1825. A successful decade of growth followed followed by another rough span of years which involved the moral disintegration of the pastor and near dissolution of the congregation.
As these cataclysms were taking place, numerous out-and-in migrations were occurring as the people of St. Pius Church joined America in its move West and as families fled Ireland's three seasons of potato crop rotting in the ground.
As the area developed, several dozen wealthy farmers and millers emerged as the dominant economic force around White Sulphur. Several stores and a large blacksmith facility were also part of the small village.
Father Drew's pastorate came at a time when Irish immigrants were moving into or through the White Sulphur area and at a time when a strong pastor could have built upon the area's tradition as a strong Catholic center. But father Drew left Scott County in late 1844 and by 1845 he was working for the new Diocese of Chicago. His last entry into the Scott baptismal registry was in 1842, and his illegible scrawl in that book attests to his declining spirit in the years prior to his taking leave of Kentucky.
With Father Drew's departure, it can only be presumed which priests cared for the remnant congregation of St. Pius Church. By 1844 there were active churches established in Lexington and Covington. Clergy from Bardstown or Lebanon educational institutions might have traveled to eastern regions as they had done in years past. Maysville became a parish in 1847. When Frankfort got a resident pastor in 1848, St. Pius Church became a mission.