FAREWELL TO FATHER JAMES FOX, February 14, 1879

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Pasted in one of Hogan’s little scrapbooks, in the archives of the Diocese of Kansas City – St. Joseph, a yellowed newspaper clipping has Father Fox’s obituary.  He died February 14, 1879. Unfortunately, Hogan did not note the publication name.

Shared characteristics of the two Irish prelates come through in this accounting – fiscal responsibility and near-abhorrence of debt; dedication; plain spoken clarity of thought and word. Hogan and Fox were both frontier priests, ordained by Archbishop Kenrick, dedicated to the promise of America for the poor, the hopeful and the ambitious. They built churches, established schools and cleared debt

A brief biography was included in Father Fox’s obituary:

Obituary: The Rev. James Fox

Sketch of his life and labors – His last sickness – the funeral arrangements – services tomorrow.

The death of another well-known Catholic priest, in the person of Rev. James Fox of St. Patrick’s parish, which occurred yesterday, will occasion emotions of no ordinary depth among many persons who enjoyed no intimate acquaintance with the deceased, but had heard of his labors. The loss of him will be especially felt in the parish to which he had devoted the last years of his life, and for which he had done so much, and there will be abundant manifestations of the profound sorrow, which his decease has caused amongst his parishioners.

SKETCH OF HIS LIFE

Father Fox was born in the county of Wicklow, Ireland, in 1820, and his college days were spent at the Carlow institution, which is one of the highest in that country and to which no one who is not very proficient in his studies is admitted. He had as a fellow student Bishop Ryan, and both made great progress at the college. In 1849 he emigrated to the United States and on St. Peter and Paul’s day—the 29^th of June of that year—was ordained a priest by the Most Rev. Peter Richard Kenrick in this city. After his ordination he remained six month here in various capacities and was then transferred to Potosi, Washington County to take charge of the church there. He remained there one year and was next appointed successor of Father Cotter of Old Mines, in the same county.

At that time the country was in the condition of all newly opened territory, and the labors which devolved upon him were unusually arduous. His mission extended through Washington and into Jefferson, Iron, St. Francois and Crawford counties, he giving personal supervision to other churches than his own. He lived, or had his residence, at Old Mines eighteen years. It has been said that he lived on horseback, so large a portion of his time was he away from his home. He built the Old Mines, Irondale, Potosi and DeSoto churches, and was largely assisted in his work by Bishop Hogan of St. Joseph and Father Hays of this city, who had charge of the churches established by him. While at Old Mines, in 1868, he was appointed successor of Father Cavanaugh as pastor of Assumption church, St. Louis. He was eighteen or nineteen months at the Assumption and then in May,

… Father Wheeler, at Munich. While at the Assumption his zeal had found fitting employment in clearing off the debt of the church and in bringing the Sisters of St. Joseph from Carondelet to a convent in the parish. He was especially attached to children, and finding on his accession to the pastorate of St. Patrick’s that there were 2,500 or 3,000 of them in the parish without the opportunities for Catholic education, he at once actively interested himself in procuring the needed facilities and the result was the erection of St. Patrick’s school, which is considered the finest school in the city, public or private, and the finest parochial school in the United States. The school and ground cost upwards of $90,000. He looked upon it as his crowning effort, and sickness alone prevented him from witnessing the school in operation. His last words from the altar, the last time he officiated at the church, nearly six weeks ago, were that the school would be open for the children on the morrow. The morrow came, but it found him on a sick bed.

In connection with his labors at St. Patrick’s parish, it may be stated that he was successful in paying off a debt of $24,000, which there was on the church

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE DECEASED

Father Fox was not an orator, and in the pulpit he devoted less attention to doctrinal points than to practical every day advice. He was a plain but forcible speaker and what he said acquired additional force from the zeal with which he was filled and which made itself manifest in all that he did. He was a very earnest worker; years ago he was the embodiment of the pioneer spirit; disregarded fatigue, and bore up under circumstances which would have overwhelmed many stronger men. In St. Patrick's parish he gave his whole energies to his work, and went from door to door urging his parishioners to a more faithful performance of their duties. His charities were uncircumscribed.

His health had always been frail, and it was kept so by his forgetting himself in his work. Some six weeks ago he was attacked with typhoid pleurisy, and his system, as it were, collapsed. It is thought that there were some evidences of consumption, which had been induced by exposure in all kinds of weather. The best of medical advice was obtained for him, and two of the Alexian brothers waited constantly upon him during the past month. He died with perfect resignation shortly after six o'clock yesterday morning. His confessor was Father Tschieter, S.J., of St. Joseph's church and the blessed sacrament was administered by Father Hays.

JOHN HOGAN'S FIRST PARISH - ST. JOACHIM CHURCH IN OLD MIINES

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Soon after John Hogan was ordained by Archbishop Peter Kenrick (1852), he received his first assignment – assistant to Rev. James Fox, pastor of St. Joachim’s Church in Old Mines. In Father Fox he found a mentor and lifelong friend. Young Father Hogan worked with Father Fox for more than a year, learning the strategies of a frontier priest – hours and days in the saddle, serving parishes across many counties, ministering to scattered Catholics families who were settling the state. 

Since the mid-18th century, Jesuits and other priests had served the spiritual needs of the miners and settlers, mostly French, in the area of Potosi, Richwoods and Old Mines. Tradition says that there were several log churches in this location before the present church was built. It was dedicated in 1831. The church site itself was sold to Archbishop Peter Richard Kenrick, another of Hogan's mentors, for a dollar in 1850. (Yes, the church was built before the Church owned the land. So went life on the frontier.)

Father Fox was the pastor of St. Joachim's from 1852 to 1868. During that time he enlarged the original church building. According to a history of the parish:

On November 12, 1854 the church was blessed and placed under the invocation of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Joseph by Rev. A. S. Paris, priest of the Cathedral Church of the Diocese of St. Louis, assisted by Rev. J. Caffrey (more on Father James Caffrey in a future post) and Rev. S. Grugan, in the presence of a large concourse of people. It was then reconsecrated by Bishop Duggan on November 15, 1857.

St. Joachim's Church today.  (page 27, Mystery of the Irish Wilderness)

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IRISH WILDERNESS TAKES SHAPE IN THE OZARKS - 1858 - 1859

November, 1858: For more than a year, John Joseph Hogan with surveyors and friends had scouted  Missouri's southeastern Ozarks for arable land, filed claims for plots through the land agents of Cape Girardeau and found immigrant Irish who would settle the land and work a farm. Near the end of November 1858 – 155 years ago – Hogan again set out for his southern colony.  This fourth trip would be his longest (11 months) sojourn in the Ozarks and the most active months of development of the settlement he envisioned.

Interestingly – and a fact not noted in most official and unofficial histories of his settlement – Hogan did not prefer the deeper Ozarks.  In 1857, on his first reconnaissance trip, he had claimed land in the area around Ellsinore and along the Little Black River (“480 acres in a body on Ten Mile Creek”) finding it more suitable for agriculture and with “improved land enough” that they would not be starting from scratch.  However when he returned in the late fall of 1858, he found his plans had been dramatically changed.

Arrived at the settlement, I found a difficulty existing. In the district of country where I had bought land the year previous, intending to make the place the center of the proposed settlement, I found that all the government land, fit for cultivation, had in the meantime been bought by parties not Catholics, so that there was no longer a possibility of owning sufficient ground there to form a colony such as I had contemplated. There was improved land enough in the neighborhood that could be bought at a reasonable price and on easy conditions. But the cry was for government land and at government price.

Westward then, though very much against my will, I had to move about forty miles, to a region of country where there was yet much vacant government land, on the confines of Ripley and Oregon counties, along the tributaries of the Current and Eleven Point rivers, about twenty miles north of the state of Arkansas.

Colton's Missouri Map of 1875 clearly locates the central point of Father Hogan's colony on the Oregon/Ripley county line about 20 miles north of Arkansas and a few miles east of the Eleven Point River.  Locations lingered on printed maps sometimes well after their demise. 

From that point on, Hogan and arriving Irish immigrants were busy shaping this growing community.  In Hogan’s classic memoir, On the Mission in Missouri, he compresses the building activities of many months into a short paragraph:

Improvements went on apace; cutting down trees, splitting, rails, burning brushwood, making fences, grubbing roots and stumps, building houses, digging wells, opening roads, breaking and ploughing land, and sowing crops. Already in the spring of 1859, there were about forty families on the newly acquired government lands, or on improved farms purchased, east and west of Current River, in the counties of Ripley and Oregon; and many more were coming …

He mentions the log chapel built on "ground bought and donated by Reverend James Fox of Old Mines, Missouri: a one story log house forty feet square … partitioned into two apartments, one for the chapel and the other for the priest’s residence."  Perhaps the chapel was built while paperwork on the tract of land was in the works. In searching land records, we found that Reverend Fox was issued a land patent on September 1, 1859 (near the end of Hogan’s sojourn in the Ozarks) for 320 acres on Oregon County, which he donated to the flourishing colony. 

In the archives of the St. Louis Archdiocese is a small account book that Father Hogan kept during his time in the Ozarks. In it we found his enumeration of the cost of his log church in the pines: $85.31 (page 48, Mystery of the Irish Wilderness)

Hogan traveled back to Chillicothe at the end of October, 1859, ending his full time presence and oversight of the colony. One more brief trip – November 17 to mid-December 1859 – to southeast Missouri was his last. Soon the Civil War made travel perilous. Demands of his expanding missionary parish in northwest Missouri increased. Hogan remained in the north, but still recalled with affection and concern the settlers he had led to area.

Postscript: Long after the settlement had been scattered by the vagaries of war, another land record tells a sad story of the Irish settlement.  On May 17, 1879, the property Father Fox had donated to the colony for the log church was sold for back taxes.