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St. Peter’s Church is a
rural parish located on Highway 50, sixty miles west of Pueblo, and twelve miles
east of La Junta in the Arkansas Valley. The surrounding countryside is a
patchwork of fields filled with corn, alfalfa, onion, watermelon and cantaloupe:
Rocky Ford is famous for its melon crops On June 3, 1994, the parish
joyously celebrated the 100th anniversary of the first mass
celebrated in the original St. Peter’s Church.
One hundred years
earlier, the event was also a joyous occasion for the Catholics of the area,
especially for Rocky Ford resident, James Guthrie, who had spearheaded the
movement to build the church. Guthrie, a devout Catholic, was accustomed to
traveling to La Junta by wagon each Sunday with his family to celebrate mass.
The trip took three hours, in both directions. He proposed a Catholic Church be
built in Rocky Ford, hoping that a church would eventually support a permanent
pastor and a regular Sunday masses.
With
lots donated by the Rocky Ford mayor, support from local businessmen, and
donations of money, labor, and material, the church was realized. Although
construction was completed in 1884, mass was only celebrated once a month until
1910, when St. Peter’s was assigned its first resident priest
and became an independent parish.
In 1920, Fr. Patrick Conway arrived in Rocky Ford,
and remained the pastor for the next thirty-four years. He is credited with
increasing Anglo and Hispanic membership in the church, and initiating the
missions of Manzanola and Fowler.
In 1948, after WWII, the current church structure,
which had formerly been a chapel at the La Junta Air Base, was purchased,
dismantled and then reassembled on the site of the old church to serve as a
larger place of worship for the congregation of St. Peter’s. Eight years
later, a parish hall and Catechetical center were built next to the rectory.
Today, those same structures serve the congregation of 450 families.
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