St. Bernard's Catholic Church

A town of a hundred-odd people doesn’t get a stone church by accident. It gets one because the people who settled it — Irish and Basque immigrants, most of them sheep and cattle families a long way from home — wanted something permanent, and were willing to haul and dress the rock themselves.

Built from the ground it stands on

St. Bernard’s Catholic Church went up in 1914, its walls quarried from the same local stone that built the pelota fronton a block away and the other early buildings of the town. The two communities that filled its pews had come from opposite ends of Europe to do the same hard work on the same dry range, and the church was their common ground: Mass, weddings, christenings, and funerals in a parish where the surnames ran from Basque to County Cork.

More than a century later the church still holds services, and its stone gable is still the tallest thing on the townsite — a skyline unchanged in any photograph since the First World War.

Visiting

St. Bernard’s is an active parish; visitors are welcome to admire the stonework anytime and to attend when doors are open. It sits just off US-95 in the heart of town — an easy stop on a walking loop with the fronton, and one of the best-preserved pieces of pioneer stone architecture in southeastern Oregon.