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. Everyone has long called it Catholic Point. In 1824, Father Gabriel Richard paid $82.33 for the peninsula. He was the Detroit priest who also served in Congress and helped found the University of Michigan. The land came on a federal 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. It was named St. Felicité, on a farm just south of the present town. As the parish grew it moved and rebuilt. It traded the log walls for a frame church. Then, in 1903, came 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. It was a run of threes nobody planned but everybody remembers.

The settlement around the point answered to “Belle River” for years. That was 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 that the parish brought over from a Detroit church. A tracker organ is a pipe organ worked by mechanical linkage rather than electricity. There was also an old bell ordered from France. It rang the point well into the 1960s. Stand on the seawall today and the geography explains itself. Two rivers fold together into one, with a church on the very tip. That’s exactly where a traveling priest decided in 1824 that this odd little point was worth eighty-two dollars and change.