By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
My boyhood stomping ground of Ogden, Utah is so far away from Ireland—geographically, culturally, climatically— that I often bemoan what seems to be a chasm sundering me from the legacy of my O’Brien name. This self-pity subsides, however, at least for a while, whenever I encounter a new story about my hometown Celtic heritage.
I cherish each time it happens (see: Irish-American history in my Utah backyard). Fortunately, it occurred again recently when my friend, Utah historian Gary Topping, lent me a book about Utah Catholic history up through 1926. The book revealed a significant cultural anniversary I somehow had overlooked—an Irish priest celebrated the first known Catholic Mass in Ogden 150 years ago this year.
Catholic history in Utah runs deeper than most people suspect. In 1776, as a new nation was born on the American East Coast, out west the Spanish Catholic Franciscan priests Silvestre Velez de Escalante and Atanasio Dominguez explored much of my home state, hoping to start missions and seeking an overland route to Monterrey, California. They probably said Mass somewhere along the way, but no one ever has verified that fact.
Eighty-three years later, another Franciscan priest—German-born Father Bonaventure Keller from Philadelphia—offered the first known Catholic Mass in Utah in July 1859 at Camp Floyd, an Army outpost 50 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. National military leaders had stationed troops there to put down an anticipated “Mormon rebellion,” but they ended up only protecting travelers passing through to the Pacific Coast. The soldiers left when the American Civil War started.
In 1871, a few years after that terrible war ended, San Francisco Archbishop Joseph Alemany designated Father Patrick Walsh as pastor of the vast Utah Territory. Walsh was born in Ossory, County Kilkenny, Ireland, studied for the priesthood at Mission Dolores seminary in San Francisco, and was ordained a priest there in 1860. For a decade before coming to Utah, Father Walsh ministered to miners after the California Gold Rush and built several new churches in towns springing up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Once in Utah, Walsh built St. Mary Magdalene’s church—the predecessor facility to Salt Lake City’s magnificent Cathedral of the Madeleine. He laid the cornerstone on Sunday, September 24, 1871, and the church was ready for use by Christmas. The cost was just under $12,000.
With that significant task completed, when the new year of 1872 arrived Father Walsh was ready for other Utah endeavors. He turned his eyes north and celebrated the first known Mass in my hometown of Ogden. In his 1926 book One Hundred and Fifty Years of Catholicity in Utah, writer Louis J. Fries provides what seems to be the most-detailed account of this historic event.
Fries wrote that Father Walsh “celebrated mass and preached a sermon at the home of Michael Maguire on the south side of Twenty-fifth Street between what are now Lincoln and Grant avenues. There were 17 people present at the mass – Richard Delany; two ladies and a gentleman of the Telegraph Company’s service; Con Dawson and Robert Gettings, mining men; Mrs. John Maguire, Sr.; Michael Maguire and his wife Margaret, their two-year-old son John, and infant daughter, Frances; John Maguire, Jr., and his wife, Mary E. Maguire; Mrs. Bridget McMonagle, a widow, and her little daughter Mary; and Charles and Don Maguire. Father Walsh came up from Salt Lake City on the evening previous to the day when he celebrated Mass and returned to Salt Lake on an evening train.”
The same day, Walsh also baptized little Frances (“Fanny”) Maguire, who was born just five months earlier, probably the first Catholic baptism in Ogden. Thereafter—according to Louis Fries’ book—priests traveled from Salt Lake about once a month to say Mass until 1877, when locals built a new church (today known as “old St. Joseph”) near the Maguire home where Walsh had celebrated the first Ogden Mass.
I walked past those same sites hundreds of times as a boy with no clue about what happened there. In addition, until recently, I knew nothing about the Maguire family, which holds its own unique place in Utah history. My friend Gary Topping has told the story quite well (see: Don Maguire: Utah Catholic adventurer), describing Don Maguire as “a trader, traveler, miner, archaeologist, poet and public figure.”
Gary explained, “Separating fact from fiction in telling the story of [Maguire’s] life is no small problem, for most biographical information comes from his own pen, and he was known to stretch the truth.” Born in Vermont in 1852, Maguire’s father was an Irish immigrant and a separatist wanted in Great Britain. The family moved to Ogden hoping to use its railroad hub for “an itinerant trading business on the western frontier.” When his trading days ended, Maguire became a pillar of his Ogden church. His died in 1933 while returning home from confession there. According to Gary, “Other than martyrdom, no Catholic could have planned a better exit.”
As for Father Patrick Walsh, after saying Ogden’s first Mass in 1872 at the home of Don Maguire’s brother Michael, the priest remained in Utah for about another year. In August 1873, he introduced Utah Catholics to his successor as territory pastor, another Irish priest but this time from from County Tipperary, Ireland. His successor had a name still familiar to most Utah Catholics today—Lawrence Scanlan.
In 1881, Scanlan sent yet another Irish priest—named Patrick Michael Cushnahan—to Ogden, where he lived and worked for nearly five decades. Cushnahan built my elementary school as well as the present-day Saint Joseph Church overlooking Ogden on the corner of 24th Street and Adams Avenue. I walked to that lovely edifice many times, just after sunrise, to serve as an altar boy at early Sunday morning Mass. My good friend Father John LaBranche was the pastor. I also graduated from high school there in 1979, almost a century after Father Cushnahan’s arrival.
One afternoon a few years ago, Gary Topping and I drove to Ogden, visited Don Maguire’s still-standing home at 549 25th Street, and walked along some of paths trod by these early Irish Catholics of Northern Utah. Although Gary knew the Maguires well, I gave him his first ever tour of their lovely St. Joseph church where I also had spent so much time (see: Altar boy daydreams). It was a wonderful day, but why are such moments important?
Too many people seem to believe history is a boring or useless compilation of dates, proclamations, battles, events, and dead people, the study of which we must endure in school—as some sort of cruel rite of passage—so we can move on to the more important, bigger, and better things in our lives.
I respectfully dissent. History is the story of life. If we let it, history reveals how and why those things in our lives got started, and intimately binds us to them, so that we can strive to make them bigger and better or understand why we failed in the effort.
At least that’s what history does for me, as I attempt to discern what it means to be an Irish Catholic in the middle of an arid mountain desert some 5,000 miles away from the Emerald Isle where O’Briens first walked.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings (found here), about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, was published by Paraclete Press (more information here) in August 2021.
