Catholic Point: the wedge of land a priest bought for $82.33

A triangle of ground in Marine City has been church land for two centuries. It’s the wedge where the Belle River runs into the broad St. Clair, and everyone has long called it Catholic Point. In 1824, Father Gabriel Richard — the Detroit priest who also served in Congress and helped found the University of Michigan — paid $82.33 for the peninsula, on a federal land grant signed by President John Quincy Adams.

Richard was buying a foothold for the faith at a river crossing the French had worked for generations. The first building was a log church raised in 1826, named St. Felicité, on a farm just south of the present town. As the parish grew it moved and rebuilt, trading the log walls for a frame church and then, in 1903, for the brick Holy Cross Church that still stands at the point. A local builder, Matthew Sicken, won the job with a bid of exactly $33,333.33 — a run of threes nobody planned but everybody remembers.

The settlement around the point answered to “Belle River” for years, the French name for the pretty stream that defines the wedge. The shipbuilders came later and renamed the place Marine City, but the older name held on as a neighborhood, and the river still carries it.

Holy Cross kept a tracker organ — a pipe organ worked by mechanical linkage rather than electricity — that the parish brought over from a Detroit church, and an old bell ordered from France that rang the point well into the 1960s. Stand on the seawall today and the geography explains itself: two rivers folding together into one, with a church on the very tip, exactly where a traveling priest decided in 1824 that this odd little point was worth eighty-two dollars and change.