dlynn
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Posts: 63
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Post by dlynn on Mar 10, 2009 18:32:56 GMT -6
I have photo's of the Russian church that was on 401 S. Illinois St. but don't know how to post. If someone could tell me I'll put the photo's on. I have just learned dates regarding this Church. The Church was sent as a gift from Czar Alexander 111. It arrived in America at the Worlds Columbian Exposition held in 1893. It was sold, disassembled and brought to Streator by William Hunter, my grandmothers first husband. It was used by the Russian Orthodox congregation until 1910 for 17 years. Then in 1910 the Beulah baptist congregation purchased it until 1916. The Polish immigrants purchased it, calling it St. Casimirs, remodeling it over the years until 1964 when it was taken down. And a new and present St. Casimirs was built. I was 13 years old when the Russian Church was taken down. I don't recall it.
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dlynn
Junior Member
Posts: 63
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Post by dlynn on Mar 12, 2009 19:29:11 GMT -6
This is a photo of the Russian Orthodox Church at the Worlds Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893. It was an excellent example of the Russian type of architecture of that period. When it was dismantled, it was shipped to Streator and re-assembled at 401 South Illinois Street. My grandmother, Julia (Wargo) first husband, William Hunter (a merchant Russian, and businessmen) who was very active in the Russian Orthodox Church in Rockdale, Illinois but lived in Streator, was one of the two men who went to Chicago and handled the transactions of bringing this church to Streator.
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dlynn
Junior Member
Posts: 63
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Post by dlynn on Mar 17, 2009 19:18:29 GMT -6
I can't believe this church was torn down. It could have been an historical site for Streator. This paticular church, was indeed one of a kind. The following is a Streator article, and the auther did a good job telling us about the Chruch. I was in Russia, to my grandfathers forest village, of Kleshci. I walked in his footsteps. I saw the village chruch that has withstood years, of war, and famine. I took part in a service, and as the auther describes the Streator Chruch, it remined me of exactly what I participated in. There were no pews to sit in. Only a few benchs on the outer walls for the elderly. The service lasted 3 hours, not uncommon for even these pheasants. After bread was handed out for communionion the elder ladys would take what bread crumbs were left, divide and fold them in there hankys as if scarkret. Not a crumb would be left. I could tell you so much more. Memories that would last a life time. Heres the Streator article..... Streator Daily Free Press Monday December 3, 1894 The New Russian Church (on Illinois Street.)
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dlynn
Junior Member
Posts: 63
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Post by dlynn on Aug 12, 2009 18:12:23 GMT -6
I was just told that an article was in the Springfield, Illinois paper about the Russian Orthodox Faith and Immigrants. It posted our Russian Cemetery Cross on the top of the article. You can see the article by going to Illinois Times.com The go to features and scroll down to the bottom where its titled "Shadows of the Mother Land, by William Furry. Great article, and great historical information, including Streator as being part of that history. Former Illinois Times editor William Furry is the assistant director of the Illinois State Historical Society and editor of Illinois Heritage, its popular history magazine. Although the Russian Orthodox Church in Streator closed nearly 100 years ago, the old city cemetery still receives Orthodox burials. The three-barred cross has been a symbol of the Russian Orthodox Church for centuries. The bar at the top symbolizes the signboard on which was written, “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews” (John 19:19); the middle crossbeam represents the bar upon which Jesus’ hands were nailed; and the slanted bar at the bottom represents the beam where his feet were nailed. The beam is slanted upwards and pointing towards Paradise, symbolizing the good thief on Jesus’ right, who repented and went to heaven, and downwards to the left for the thief destined for Hell. PHOTO BY WILLIAM FURRY T he trained eye rarely misses them: three-barred crosses and primitive, colorful icons, occasionally spotted in roadside cemeteries and out-of-the-way chapels from Chicago to Carbondale. Onion-shaped domes, curious spires and cupolas — the international symbols of Eastern Orthodoxy — still adorn churches in small, former mining communities where Baptists, Methodists and Evangelicals now abound. The Russian Orthodox Church, once the faith community and cultural center for thousands of first- and second-generation Eastern European immigrants, is today a shadow of its former self in downstate Illinois. Its symbolic presence, however, remains a visual reminder of the forces, communities and personalities that still shape our prairie psyche. The Russian Orthodox Church in Illinois began with a gift and a blessing. The gift came from Czar Alexander III, Emperor of Russia from 1881-1894. In 1892, Alexander commissioned his favorite architect, Petrovo Ropette, to design the Russian Pavilion for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Alexander wanted to memorialize his father, Czar Alexander II, who had been assassinated by revolutionaries in 1881. Ropette, known as the “Father of Russian Revival Architecture,” was the logical choice. He previously had designed pavilions for the Paris (1878) and Copenhagen (1888) world expositions. The Russian Pavilion for the Columbian Exposition, described as a “massive architectural structure, executed in dark wood” and built in the 17th-century Muscovite style, was said to be similar in design to the palace where Peter the Great was born. The pavilion was constructed in Moscow, disassembled, shipped to Chicago, and rebuilt in the Manufacturers Building at the Columbian Exposition, where it was seen by thousands in the glistening White City. The blessing came on two legs from St. Petersburg, a Russian-born priest named John Alexandrovich Kochurov. Father John was born in the village of Bigildino-Surka in the Ryazan region of western Russia in 1871, son of Alexander Kochurov, an Orthodox priest, and his wife, Anna, who bore him several children. (The Orthodox church ordains married men to the priesthood.) Alexander’s example was imprinted on his son, for John went on to study at Danky Theological School, Ryazan Theological Seminary and later at St. Petersburg Theological Academy. At the time of his graduation in 1895, Father John had his heart set on service as a parish priest and missionary in the Diocese of the Aleutians and Alaska, which in the Russo-centric universe of the day included Chicago, “a huge city with a heterodox population torn asunder by wild beasts.” Icon of St. Luke The Evangelist, located in the nave of Holy Dormition Church in Benld. In 1895, Chicago’s Orthodox parish included two churches, St. Vladimir’s in Chicago and the Church of the Three Hierarchs in Streator, a growing industrial community 94 miles southwest of Chicago in LaSalle County. Father John, by then married and with his own growing family, spoke little or no English but possessed a missionary’s zeal to serve God and his diaspora. He conducted services at both congregations. St. Vladimir’s included Russians, Galicians, Hungarian Slavs, Arabs, Bulgarians and Aravians, mostly poor immigrants who worked in the factories and stockyards. The Streator church community was comprised of Poles and Slovaks, most of who worked in the coal mines. Few were Orthodox faithful by birth. Many were Uniates — Ukrainians and Belarusians who had spiritual ties to the Roman Catholic Church but retained their own Eastern liturgy. In Streator, Poles and Slovaks did not assimilate into the Irish, Italian and German Catholic parishes. Father John saw their need and made it his mission to convert them to Orthodoxy. After the Columbian Exposition closed, the resourceful Father John arranged for the façade, tower and traditional ornamentation of the Russian Pavilion to be shipped to Streator, where all were reassembled as the new sanctuary for the Three Hierarchs Church, officially listed in the 1901 Streator city directory as the Russian Greek Catholic Orthodox Church. Though the church’s sanctuary was of simple construction, its ornate façade turned heads in Streator. Unfortunately, the structure has not survived. After Father John left America in 1907, the church passed into the hands of a fringe Baptist congregation, which sold the structure in 1916 to the Polish Catholic community in Streator, who renamed it St. Casimir’s. The church was demolished in the 1960s and a new modern building erected in its place. It has since closed. As rector of St. Vladimir’s in Chicago, Father John was tasked with raising money to build a new church. After a brief fundraising trip to Russia in May 1900, he helped raise more than $50,000 for construction of Chicago’s Holy Trinity Cathedral, today one of the most remarkable Orthodox churches in America. Father John enlisted famed architect Louis Sullivan to design the cathedral, which was completed and consecrated in 1903. The iconostasis (icon stand) at Holy Dormition Church in Benld, 60 miles south of Springfield. The iconostasis separates the altar from the nave in most Orthodox churches. PHOTO BY WILLIAM FURRY Father John was the only priest to serve the Chicago/Streator parish from 1895-1905. During that time he also organized Orthodox churches in Joliet and officiated in the blessing of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary Orthodox Church in Madison, Ill., near Granite City in 1900. Father John’s reach extended to fledgling Orthodox communities in the southern Illinois mining towns of Benld, Buckner, Grand Tower, Royalton and Muddy, where large populations of Russians and Eastern Europeans settled during the mining booms of the early 20th century. In 1903, for his “inspiring labors,” Father John received the Order of St. Anna from Bishop Tikhon, future Patriarch of the Orthodox Church in Moscow, and, on the occasion of his 10th anniversary in America, the Chicago priest was given a cherished pectoral crucifix for his devotion to the church. In May 1906, Father John was appointed “Dean of the New York Area of the Eastern States.” The following year, expressing a desire to be near his wife’s aging parents, Father John returned to Russia and St. Petersburg, where he started a new career as a teacher of divine law in the schools of Narva. He taught there until November 1916, when he was assigned as a parish priest to St. Catherine’s Cathedral in Tsarskoye Selo. Then came the Russian Revolution. On Oct. 31, 1917, the Bolshevik army, believing that the local priesthood was praying for its defeat, arrested Father John and several other clerics. Father John, taking a leadership role, tried to mediate. According to newspaper accounts, he was struck several times in the face, and dragged into an open arena, where “ everal rifles were raised against the defenseless pastor. A shot thundered out, then another, after which the priest fell to the ground, and blood spilled upon his cassock. Death did not come to him immediately…. He was pulled by the hair, and somebody suggested, ‘Finish him like a dog.’ The next morning the body was brought into the former palace hospital.”
Right, a resurrection icon behind the altar at Holy Dormition Church. PHOTO BY WILLIAM FURRY Those who saw the priest’s bullet-riddled corpse reported that, “[H]is pectoral cross was already gone.” Father John was buried in the cemetery at St. Catherine’s Cathedral. In 1994, he was declared a saint by the Moscow Patriarchate, which declared him the “First Clergy Martyr of the Russian Revolution.”
Orthodoxy comes to Russia
The word “Orthodox” derives from the Greek words “Ortho,” meaning “straight” or “right,” and “Doxa,” meaning “opinion.” The historic Orthodox Church evolved from the Apostolic Church founded at the first Pentecost (A.D. 33), when tradition says that Jesus gave his “great commission” to “Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.”
The Apostolic churches — those established by the original apostles — were founded in Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem and Rome. Missionaries then took the church to Sinai, Greece, Yugoslavia, Romania and Russia, where Christianity arrived in 988. It thrived there, and was unimpeded for nearly 1,000 years. In 1917, an estimated 80 million people in European Russia were Orthodox Christians. Then came the Revolution. “In a relatively short time,” writes historian Vera Shevzov, “the home of the largest Christian culture of modern times became an officially atheistic state.”
Between 1917 and 1939, more than 80,000 clerics, priests and nuns were executed by the Bolsheviks, who systematically sought to eradicate the church from Soviet Russia.
Orthodoxy comes to Illinois
In the decade after Father John left America, the Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church thrived in the communities where he helped plant it. The congregation in Benld, south of Carlinville in Macoupin County, was established on March 3, 1907, as St. Mary’s Church and is officially known today as the Holy Dormition of the Theotokos Catholicon of the Patriarchal Russian Orthodox Church. St. Mary’s celebrated its centennial in 2007 and last October received an Illinois Centennial Parish award from the Illinois State Historical Society at the Governor’s Mansion in Springfield.
Protection of the Holy Virgin Mary Orthodox Church in Royalton was established in 1914 by Russian immigrants from Belarus and Ukraine. PHOTO BY WILLIAM FURRY St. Mary’s original 40 parishioners, including many first-generation Russian and Eastern European families, raised $950 to build their first church, a frame structure. The church enjoyed the blessing of Czar Nicholas II and the Patriarch of Moscow, who gave the parish holy relics of the saints and icons from the Motherland. Unfortunately, on July 27, 1915, the feast day of St. Vladimir, the church and all its contents were destroyed by fire. The parish rebuilt the church — this time of brick — and the Central Diocese in Russia promised to help by paying half of the wages for a full-time parish priest.
The Russian Revolution ended that congenial relationship. During the 1920s, many Russian Orthodox Churches in the United States reluctantly broke off with the Patriarchate in Moscow, setting up their own hierarchy in America, “the Russian Orthodox Church in Exile Outside of Russia,” later shortened to the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR). Since the fall of communism and the resurgence of the Orthodox Church in Russia, ROCOR has reconciled and re-established ties with the Moscow Patriarchate. American Orthodox churches that remained affiliated with the Moscow church throughout the revolution and Cold War (Father John’s Illinois parishes, for example), eventually sought independence from the Patriarchate and were granted full autonomy in 1970. They belong to the Orthodox Church in America (OCA), the foundation of most Orthodox communities in the U.S.
Holy Protection Church, Royalton
St. Mary’s Russian Orthodox Cemetery on the eastern edge of Royalton in Franklin County is as well maintained as a country club golf course, its manicured lawn and polished monuments a visual reminder of the disciplined souls that sleep beneath them. A mining boomtown established by the Royal Coal Company in 1907, Royalton was settled by Eastern European families, several from Belarus, a fertile land between Russia and Poland. Lured from their farms to the lucrative coalfields of southern Illinois, the Orthodox faithful in Royalton received sacraments through a priest from St. Michael the Archangel Russian Orthodox Church in St. Louis until 1914. That year parishioners mounted a campaign to build their own church. Each family was asked to give $25 at the start of the building and another $25 when the building was completed. The parish raised $2,200 and started construction.
Holy Dormition of the Theotokos Catholicon of the Partriarchal Russian Orthodox Church in Benld was founded in 1907. The first church was destroyed by fire in 1915, and this handsome brick church was built on the site. Holy Dormition Church plans to close its doors in 2009 to become a monastery. PHOTO BY WILLIAM FURRY But as the church walls were going up, disaster struck. On Oct. 27, 1914, an explosion at the Franklin County Coal Mine #7 killed 52 men, including 13 members of the parish. The mining company donated land to bury the miners, and that plot of ground became St. Mary’s Russian Orthodox Cemetery.
The Royalton Orthodox church, Protection of the Holy Virgin Mary, was finished the following year and dedicated to the dead miners. Every year on the anniversary of the mine explosion, the church conducts a solemn requiem service in their memory, and flowers are placed on their graves.
Although the Orthodox parish in Royalton has declined in recent years, the church and grounds — just like the cemetery — are meticulously maintained. Father Nicholas Finley, the new parish priest who was raised in St. Michael the Archangel Orthodox Church in St. Louis and ordained in the Madison, Ill., Orthodox parish, is enthusiastic and optimistic his church will continue to inspire and serve the faithful. According to the church’s Web site, the bells of Holy Protection Church ring out every day, inviting all to take a moment to be with God.
St. Iosaph’s Church
Fifty miles east of Royalton is the tiny village of Muddy, population 78, according to the 2000 U.S. census. The sign at the city limits rounds the number up to 100. Chicago speculators discovered coal near Robinson’s Ford on the Middle Fork of the Saline River, and sunk a mine there in 1903. The Big Muddy Coal Company eventually changed the name of the hamlet to “Muddy,” which stuck. The mine, however, didn’t last, leaving behind a massive concrete tipple on the local landscape.
St. Iosaph’s Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church was organized soon after the Muddy mine was sunk, probably by the same immigrants who later migrated to Royalton. St. Ioasaph (the Muddy church modified the spelling) was a 17th century bishop of Belgorod whose name was — and still is — revered by the Orthodox faithful, especially those from the Ukraine.
Madeline Kertesz Pisani, now of St. Louis, grew up in Muddy and lived next to St. Iosaph’s Church on property owned by her grandmother. The church, she says, served a significant population of Orthodox Christians who worked in the Muddy mine until the Royalton and Ziegler mines opened. That coal, she says, was easier to get out of the ground, so many of the miners moved to Franklin County. Those who remained behind, however, were faithful to the church. A priest from Royalton came over to perform services and sacraments — first weekly, then monthly, then occasionally. Eventually, the parish faded away.
The plans used to construct St. Iosaph’s Church later served to build Holy Protection Church in Royalton; their footprints are nearly identical. St. Iosaph’s onion-dome cupola was destroyed by a tornado in the 1930s, but the one on Royalton’s roofline remembers for both. Pisani recalls as a child playing with St. Iosaph’s dome on the ground of her front yard after the storm blew through Muddy.
Aside from its cornerstone and three-barred cross on the steeple, St. Iosaph’s exterior could easily be mistaken for a primitive Baptist or Cumberland Presbyterian church. But its soul is undeniably Orthodox. Though services are no longer conducted there, every Sept. 17, the Feast Day of St. Ioasaph, the church doors are open, and pilgrims from Royalton, St. Louis, Des Plaines, Knoxville, Tenn., and other towns near and far return to Muddy to bless the old church.
Today St. Iosaph’s, although structurally sound and intact, has seen better days. The church and grounds sit in the shadow of an AMEREN power substation off a gravel road on the outskirts of town. Pisani and her brother now own the church and the old rectory, and have taken pains to maintain and restore them. “We put a new roof on the church last year and we’re working on restoring the bell tower now,” she says. “We can’t stand to see it fall to nothing.”
Although the Orthodox Church in southern Illinois’ mining belt has declined significantly in the last 50 years, the church is on the rise again in urban communities. Father John Matusiak, rector of St. Joseph’s Church in Wheaton, reports that the Orthodox Church in America is strong, vital, and, since the fall of the USSR, has strengthened its ties with the church in Russia. While OCA enjoys a “sister church” relationship with the Moscow Patriarchate, says Father John, it in no way sees itself as “the U.S. branch of the Russian church.”
“Over the past 20 years OCA has planted nearly 300 new parishes in the U.S., including several in the Chicago area — Wheaton, Palos Hills, Hyde Park — as well as in Quincy and Bloomington.
“None of these churches,” Father John continues, “considers itself in any way Russian Orthodox, serving as they do people of all backgrounds and each having a substantial number of recent converts.”
New converts and parishes in northern Illinois would please Father John Kochurov, founder of the Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church in Illinois and martyr saint of Chicago and St. Petersburg. And while the decline of the church in rural and southern Illinois would distress him, he would look for signs of life and growth and hope. He understood that the shadow of the Motherland may fade in America, but the Orthodox Church has much deeper roots. That tradition, and the faith it clings to, will never change.
William Furry is executive director of the Illinois State Historical Society and editor of Illinois Heritage magazine, where this article first appeared.
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