A CENTURY OF SERVICE
"St. Petersburg Times; St. Petersburg, Fla.; Oct 1, 1988; Jeanne Pugh"
SACRED HEART CHURCH IS THE FOCUS OF AN ENDURING COMMUNITY IN PASCO
ST. JOSEPH
- An all-day celebration beginning at 10 a.m. today marks the 100th anniversary of Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church, one of the Tampa Bay area's pioneer religious institutions and a solid reminder that not all of Florida's roots have been planted in shifting sand.
Many of the participants will be in turn-of-the-century attire, recalling the early days of Sacred Heart Parish, which was founded by German immigrants for whom coming to Florida meant a lot of hard work and primitive living conditions.
Church members estimate that half the population of the community, in fact, can trace its lineage to those original settlers. They are survivors who have weathered economic and climatic storms. And, curiously, they have maintained a sense of community even though their town - ``Saint Joe,`` as they call it - has never been legally incorporated, has no elected officials and has no officially defined boundaries.
Frank and Rosemary Gude, descendants of two of the parish's founding families, recently reminisced about the community's history, drawing on personal experience and family lore.
Mrs. Gude said her grandfather, Charles Barthle, was one of the three Barthle brothers who arrived in the area in 1883 as homesteaders. The brothers had emigrated to Minnesota a couple of years earlier from the Black Forest area of Germany, intending to find work as carpenters or on the railroad. But an economic recession had made jobs scarce for immigrants in the North.
Once exposed to the cold Minnesota winters, Mrs. Gude said, the city-bred brothers and their young families were easy prey for the propaganda about Florida being spread throughout the Midwest by Judge Edmund Dunne. He had been commissioned by the Plant Investment Co. to find homesteaders for the company's land in what is now eastern Pasco County.
In addition to plugging Florida's healthful climate, fertile land and year-round growing season, Dunne was promoting the development of an ``International Catholic City`` made up of clusters of ethnic neighborhoods - German Catholics in one sector, Irish Catholics in another and so on - with Saint Leo Abbey, the Benedictine monastery, as the hub.
The ``city,`` like a lot of other schemes hatched by Florida developers, never materialized. But the German community did. Soon the Barthles were joined by more German Catholic families - the Nathes, the Blommels, the Buttweilers, the Gerners and the Zierdans - who formed the nucleus of the community that came to be known as St. Joseph.
Many of the newcomers found it difficult to adapt to an agricultural life, Mrs. Gude said. Among them was her grandfather, Charles Barthle, who became so discouraged after a freeze destroyed his fledgling citrus grove that he gave up his homestead, moved into the nearby village of San Antonio and built the St. Charles Hotel. The hotel, which was run by members of the Barthle family until the mid-1930s, is now the St. Charles Restaurant and Ice Cream Parlor.
Other settlers, however, became successful citrus and strawberry growers. By 1888, Saint Joe had grown large enough to establish its own parish.
Frank Gude said his grandparents were among the second wave of German immigrants who arrived in 1895, not long after the parish had completed construction of its second and larger sanctuary. By that time, the original church building was well-established as the community's school.
The community was especially attractive to German immigrants because the church and the school conducted their business in German, Gude said. German-speaking Benedictine monks from Saint Leo Abbey served as pastors of the congregation, and German-speaking nuns from Saint Leo's sister community, Holy Name Priory, taught at the school.
The school and church had to switch to the English language in 1918 when the parish was ordered to do so by Bishop Joseph Curley, head of the Diocese of St. Augustine, then Florida's only Catholic diocese. Shortly afterward, the school was taken over by the public school system, and the Benedictine sisters were replaced by lay teachers.
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