How Fowler's church got a name nobody could fight over

When the Catholics of Fowler set out to build their first church in 1881, they hit a snag that had nothing to do with money or lumber. They couldn’t agree on whose saint to put over the door. The parish was split between German families and Irish families, and each wanted a patron from the old country. The Germans pushed for Saint Boniface, the great German missionary. The Irish, naturally, wanted Saint Patrick.

Neither side would budge, and you can see how it might curdle a small farm town fast. So they did the wise thing: they picked a name with no nationality at all. The church became Most Holy Trinity — a name a German and an Irishman could both kneel under without either one winning. The first frame church went up that year, and as the congregation grew, a bigger brick church replaced it in 1917. It still anchors the village.

The town around it had its own knack for fresh starts. Fowler began in 1857 as a depot stop the railroad meant to call Dallas, on land that turned out to be too swampy to settle. So in 1867 they picked the whole village up and hauled it three-quarters of a mile west to drier ground, renaming it Isabella. That name didn’t take either, and two years later they renamed it a third time — Fowler, after F. N. Fowler — and it finally stuck.

A town that changed its own name twice, with a church named to keep the peace between two homelands: that’s a lot of compromise for one small Clinton County village. The result is a tidy farming community where the Holy Trinity parish festival every July, basketball tournament and all, still draws the descendants of both the Boniface side and the Patrick side to the same field.