Historic church in need of some very special help

Brendan Riley

Friday, Dec. 26, 2003 | 9:10 a.m.

VIRGINIA CITY -- This famed old mining town's shops, saloons and other attractions aren't the only places that suffer when the summer tourist season ends and icy roads make it tough to get here. So does the donation box at historic St. Mary's in the Mountains Roman Catholic Church.

The Rev. Joe Anthony, the new administrator, said he won't ever close the doors of the 127-year-old church. But he's worried about keeping the heat on during winter months for the handful of regular churchgoers and being able to pay for some much-needed restoration work.

"This is the treasure of the Catholic Church in all of Nevada. It's a beautiful place," he said of the brick, Gothic revival landmark built in 1876 to replace a church destroyed by a disastrous fire that burned down much of Virginia City.

"But two-thirds of our income comes from tourists," Anthony said. "We're not at death's doorstep (financially), but we really hurt in the wintertime.

"We don't have the people. We try to make it up in the good weather," he said.

Only about 25 families attend Mass at St. Mary's in the Mountains on a year-round basis. With their help, Anthony said he's barely able to keep the church's oil furnace burning -- and there's not enough money to handle badly needed repairs.

"The church is so old that the No. 1 thing I wish I could do is to try to maintain and restore the exterior," Anthony said.

Over the years some cornices have fallen off the outside of the building, and there are interior problems such as dry rot, he said. There's also damage caused by botched modifications to the church done in the late 1950s.

Anthony, the former longtime pastor of St. Joseph, Husband of Mary Catholic Church in Las Vegas who's been at the historic church only a few months, said he explored a basement "dungeon" that's part of the original church. There he found hundreds of artifacts -- some of it junk but other items that have religious and historic significance.

"We're creating a museum on the site, right below the church," he said. "We're trying to do the best we can on very limited funds."

The "dungeon" exploration wasn't easy: "I had rats jumping out at me," Anthony said. "But I'm a history nut. We're going to try to pull this stuff together."

Virgil Bucchianeri, a Storey County district attorney for 16 years and now a semiretired lawyer who lives across the street from the church, said it's "more of a community church than a Catholic church. People come from all over the world, people from different faiths, to see it."

"It's one of our big historic buildings," said Bucchianeri, the church's choir director. "It's one of the first buildings you see as you come into town. It's part of the history of the Comstock."

Grants in past years helped with some improvements, including the installation of a new metal roof.

"But we still have a lot of work to do," Bucchianeri said.

Virginia City, now a national historic landmark, was the heart of the famed Comstock Lode, which produced gold and silver worth up to $700 million from the late 1850s to the 1880s -- ore worth several billion dollars at today's prices.

Some of that wealth went into building elaborate, mansion-like mining offices and a main street full of ornate bars. The town also had numerous churches, an opera house, schools, and a newspaper that gave Mark Twain his first paying job as a writer.

The Virginia City area, including nearby Gold Hill, is now home to about 1,000 people. But in its heyday, it swelled to 30,000 residents as fortune-seekers flocked to Nevada , according to Bert Bedeau, administrator of the Comstock Historic District Commission.

Bedeau said St. Mary's in the Mountains cost about $60,000 -- a fortune at the time -- when it was rebuilt after the 1875 Virginia City fire. The church that it replaced had stood only about seven years.