Hubbardston's Irish church, biggest building in the county

A converted sheep shed served as the first Catholic church in Hubbardston. John Cowman, an Irish immigrant, settled here in 1849, a mile west of the village. When a priest first came through, he said Mass in Cowman’s outbuilding. Within a few years the Irish families along Fish Creek had grown from a handful to enough to register a parish. They organized St. John the Baptist with the Diocese of Detroit in 1855 — for a time the only Irish Catholic parish in Michigan.

The community kept growing. In 1868 those seventy or so families built themselves a church to match their ambitions. It cost $8,000, seated four hundred, and was by a fair margin the largest building anywhere in Ionia County when it went up. This was an immigrant farming community barely twenty years off the famine ships. Raising a building like that out of pooled labor and small donations made a statement: we are staying, and this is our place.

St. John’s became the anchor of an Irish settlement. You can still feel it in the names on the headstones and the green that comes out every March. The parish added a cemetery in 1884, a rectory in 1907, and a school in 1917. It claims one of the longest unbroken runs of any parish in the Grand Rapids diocese. By its own count, those families sent more than a dozen sons into the priesthood and many daughters into religious orders.

In 2001 the whole parish complex landed on the National Register of Historic Places, and the state marked it a historic site the same year. Stand in the churchyard on a quiet afternoon. You’re on the spot where a sheep shed once held a congregation of homesick Irish farmers.