Rural church to celebrate 100 years

Jeffrey Libby

Thursday, March 14, 2002 | 11:06 a.m.

TONOPAH -- In a former silver mining boomtown where today one of every three homes is boarded up, St. Patrick's Catholic Church on Sunday will proudly celebrate its 100th birthday.

Once a center of the nation's interest and the source of much of the money that rebuilt San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake, Tonopah has become a rural outpost where even the 18-wheelers rarely stop. It's the halfway point along the 450-mile haul between Reno and Las Vegas, some of the loneliest road in America, but there's no convenient place to pull over.

St. Patrick's still has 200 members expected to attend the corned beef and cabbage dinner at 5 p.m. at the town-owned convention center. There is talk that the high school jazz band may play and Bishop Joseph Pepe is expected as the guest of honor, on his first visit as head of the Diocese of Las Vegas. The Lady's Guild has been preparing for the event since October.

This tiny parish overlooking the hillside town has always had a priest of its own, serving 18,000 square miles that reach west to Bishop, Calif. and east to Ely. But to keep a priest, much will depend on the success of a small circle of Nye County officials and long-term Tonopah residents trying to salvage a new economy from the ashes of an all-but-dead mining industry.

As the Rev. James McCauley explained it recently over a plate of eggs with biscuits and gravy at the Silver Queen, the town's main breakfast place, "We're a long way from anywhere."

McCauley, 78, came here four years ago, giving up retirement to preach at Sunday Mass to groups of about 20 people scattered throughout two rows of eleven pews. He hears most confessions face-to-face, on metal folding chairs.

"We have the glass if you want, but in a place like this, it doesn't make much difference," he said.

The larger concern is to find jobs to keep people in town.

"We lost a lot of families (at the church) when Anaconda left," said Irene Jeffrey, president of the Lady's Guild.

Anaconda Copper announced the closing of its molybdenum mine in January 1985, erasing 450 jobs. The explanation was easy: In its five years of operation, the price of molybdenum, a steel-hardening alloy, had dropped from $40 a pound to $3 a pound.

The closing sent the town on a steady downward slide.

In May 1992 the slide grew steeper. Then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney shifted Stealth fighter operations from the Nevada Test and Training Range to Holloman Air Force Base near Alamogordo, N.M. taking hundreds of jobs.

The town has yet to recover and its population has continued to decline, from 3,600 in the early 1990s to less than 2,600 people today.

Jeffrey has watched it all. She grew up as a miner's daughter in the 1930s. Men carrying lunch pails walked a path behind her home in the mornings, and by 2 p.m., blasting shook the pictures on the wall.

"We've had our ups and downs, but this is about the lowest we've been," Jeffrey said. "But we've always got hope. Our main goal is keeping a father."

To keep the town afloat, Nye County officials are turning away from the industry that created Tonopah.

"We really don't want to focus on mining any more," Nye County Commissioner Joni Eastley said. "Those are such finite resources and we can't continue to hang our hats on what the mining industry is doing. We need to create other opportunities."

The new focus, she said, is creating an airport industrial park, modeled in part after a successful venture in the nearby rural town of Hawthorne, and fixing up the downtown to encourage more travelers to stop on their way to other places.

Tonopah isn't in the middle of nowhere, Eastley likes to say, "it's in the middle of everywhere."

Her commission and other local groups have secured more than $300,000 in state and federal grants for the two projects, with another $600,000 expected to expand the airstrip from 7,100 feet to 9,000 feet. If expanded to 12,000 feet as part of a planned second phase, the Tonopah airstrip, built during World War II, would become the third largest in the state. The hope is to attract cargo planes and other industrial uses.

But existing resources are scarce and will likely become more scarce.

"The reality is, there aren't many people in Tonopah," said Arlene Friel, manager of a hardware store and member of the St. Patrick's Lady's Guild and the Tonopah Development Corp. "The most that are work out at Round Mountain (mine) and the Test Range."

Round Mountain is said to have about six years of profitable ore left before closing. As for the Test Range, most of its employees live in Las Vegas and fly or bus to the base on one of the military's daily runs. An estimated 150 to 180 Test Range workers live in Tonopah.

That's a huge difference from the early 1950s and '60s, when several mines still operated and more people from town worked at the Test Range.

At that time, Friel and her high school friends had a movie theater to go to, a bowling alley, two drug stores with soda fountains, two women's dress shops, two shoe repair shops and three grocery stores.

Today, there is just one grocery store. When people want to watch a movie, shop for clothes or need specialized medical treatment, they go to Bishop, Reno or Las Vegas.

But at least one entrepreneur is coming to town. On Monday, New Jersey salt wholesaler Jim Castimore installed the first power poles for a 15-acre truck stop and restaurant on the east side of town. He plans to open by mid-July and says he'll need about 25 employees to run the 24-hour operation.

For now though, the downtown is silent after nightfall and in the long lulls between passing traffic, goats can be heard from a pen on a side street less than a block from Main Street in the center of town.

It's not far from where, in December 1901, the Rev. James M. Butler, a Catholic priest, held the town's first religious service, according to Nevada historian Russell Elliott. Butler, no relation to Tonopah's founder James Logan Butler, had followed his parishioners 120 miles south from Austin as word spread of the hillside silver mining camp that was to become the first boomtown of the West's last frontier, preceding by a year discoveries of gold and silver in Goldfield, and then in Ely and Rhyolite.

St. Patrick's church was built of wood in the early months of 1902, taking its place among 32 saloons, two dance halls, two churches, and dug-outs, tents and other houses built from bottles, barrels and even mud and manure. Many framed buildings had been hauled from other former boomtowns.

In 1914, crews powered by two kegs of beer and a small steam engine hauled St. Patrick's church and rectory several blocks south of Main Street to its current South Street location. The church was making way for a growing dump pile from a nearby mine.

In the early 1960s two fires destroyed the church, rectory and statuary. The church was rebuilt much to the same scale, but in cinderblock painted peach, with narrow floor-to-ceiling windows. A mosaic above the main altar depicts St. Patrick holding a clover leaf.

The church matured over the years in predictable fashion: Ranks of parishioners boomed and ebbed in sync with the quality of ore blasted from the rock and from the scale of secret projects being tested by the U.S. military.

For Father McCauley, Friel and other parishioners, the centennial is a welcome milestone. But few are spinning the event into anything larger than what it is: a service and a dinner to mark 100 years.

The Lady's Guild is selling raffle tickets for a cedar chest just as it has for about three decades now and church members are busy making crafts to fill it. The chest serves as the annual money-maker for luxuries such as a Nativity scene purchased for $4,000 over several years from an Italian manufacturer.

But this year's St. Patrick's Day will be different. The Lady's Guild is compiling a scrapbook from microfiche highlighting 100 years of church announcements in the local newspapers. And most importantly, Bishop Pepe will visit at dinner catered by the Elks Club.

"To us it's quite an honor. After all, he's the bishop," Jeffrey said.

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