Saint Anne's Catholic Church in Hamel will celebrate its 75th
anniversary this fall. The first church was built by the
parishoners themselves on land donated by J. O. Hamel, for whose
family the village was named. It was crude, and for a time
pastorless, because the Archbishop had no one to send to care for
the little flock. Missionaries served for a time.
The existence of the church in fact was unknown to the Archbishop until the building was almost completed and the parish petitioned him for a pastor.
That was in 1875. Four years later the Archbishop appointed Father L. Chandonnet pastor of the Hamel church, and the building was moved westward to newly acquired property.
As soon as Father Chandonnet arrived the parish got busy and built a house for him. Like the church it was exclusively a local job, grateful parishoners pitching in to do the work.
Hamel was originally settled by French Catholics. A mile south the Germans staked out the little village of Holy Name with the church at its center. Nearby the Irish had settled in Corcoran and built a church. There was also a settlement and a Catholic Church (St Joseph's) at Medicine Lake.
But the French in Hamel chafed at the long sermons in German at Holy Name, and the rich brogues of Corcoran town weren't too much to there liking either, so at the suggestion of a missionary priest at Medicine Lake they decided to build a church of their own.
In the typical individualistic way of the French they got busy and put up a building. Then they sent a petition to the Archbishop in St. Paul asking for a pastor. In those early days of scattered settlements there were hardly enoug h priests to go around, and most of the small villages had to be served by missionaries.
Hamel had to wait four years for a pastor, but when the parish finally got a priest-and French at that-the parishoners were so overjoyed they made their church a show place in the pioneer sense of hand-made lumber, sacristry furniture and an altar lovingly carved by hand.
The foundation of the church was wood posts set in the ground. The building was frame with beams and other rough lumber sawed at the local sawmill (Laurent). For the finished lumber, parishoners hitched up their teams and drove to Minneapolis to pick up boards sent from Stillwater.
At first only the bare exterior walls were completed, and the pews and planks laid upon chunks of wood. The floor was rough lumber and the heating plant was a woodstove. In 1879 walls were plastered, the ceiling finished with wood, and windows put in. A stone foundation was also built, but the basement was not to come until some years later.
There was a wood stove in the sacristy, and on cold winter Sundays, parishoners crowded into this little room and shut off the main and very cold body of the church. When the basement was dug a furnace was installed the the congregation spread out in the main church with a mild degree of comfort in the below-zero spells.
The bell in the steeple rang out in the angelus every day from the day it was put there in 1879, purchased from a fund raised by parishoners for that purpose. One of the proud boasts of the old timers was that the parish never went into debt. Each time something was purchased they laid cash on the barrel head to pay for it.
Through vicictudes of storms, and that hazard of pioneer buildings, fire, the little church of St. Anne came through without a scar until 1933 when it was razed to build the present brick building.
Through his long pastorate he saw Hamel change from a strictly French speaking village to an American small town. Children and grandchildren have married into other national groups, and Hamel has become another small town, U.S.A. For the past 20 years, the practice of having the sermon in French and then translated into English, has been dropped. Now sermons are in English, and no one protests, for most of the old French settlers are now in the church cemetery.