The history of St. Patrick’s parish dates back to its first parishioner, Philip Hughes, who came to the Nebraska Territory from Mississippi in 1865, two years  after the Homestead Act, signed by Abraham Lincoln, had become law. 

In 1866, he walked for days along the Elkhorn Valley in search of a homestead site. He decided on a quarter-section on the banks of the Elkhorn River, two  miles north of what is now the village of Battle Creek. Then he walked to Sioux City, Iowa to file his claim at the government office. Later he brought his family to the  homestead that was to be their home for four generations. 

Philip Hughes was active in attracting others of his faith to the Elkhorn Valley. His brother, Frank, came in 1869 and homesteaded one mile west of him.  The same year, Patrick O’Neill filed on a quarter-section of the Battle Creek, a little stream named for the unfought battle on its banks between the Pawnee Indians and  government forces in 1859.  

Other Catholics who came to the valley that year or soon after were Patrick Rooney, Patrick Manning, Samuel Kent, James Grimes, C.W. Joines, Joseph Pifer, Thomas Shalley, Paul Valmont, W. Daugherty, John Buckley, J. McKerrigan, Carl Hoffman, and a Mr. Young and a Mr. Stollard. Later in the 1870’s, W.P. O’Neill brought his family to a homestead adjoining the Philip Hughes land. (His daughter Rose became an artist and her sculptures were exhibited in American and European galleries, but she is perhaps better known as the creator of the Kewpies). 

Who were these pioneers and where had they come from and why? Some were native-born Americans, some had immigrated from Germany, Bohemia, or  Ireland, and they all came seeking free government land in the Elkhorn Valley. 

The United States government knew of the Elkhorn Valley as early as July of 1804, when the Lewis and Clark Expedition, exploring the Louisiana Purchase,  recorded reaching “a small beautiful river called Come (Corne) Cerf, Elk Horn, about a hundred yards wide with clear water and gravely channel.” During the first years of the settlement, the pioneers’ nearest shopping center was about forty miles east of them. The nearest church was south in Columbus  and Mass attendance would mean a round trip of a hundred miles. Sundays and Holy days were observed in the homes with prayer, sometimes with neighbors, and the  strict laws of fasting and abstinence of that time were kept conscientiously. Michael Hughes, son of Philip Hughes, told of the Good Friday fast that his family kept in  his childhood. That day, they took neither food nor drink until three o’clock in the afternoon when a three hour session of prayer ended with the Stations of the Cross. In 1872, the homesteaders wrote to the bishop in Omaha requesting the services of a priest. James O’Gorman, the first bishop of the Omaha diocese (which  was created in 1857), was consecrated in St. Louis in May of 1859, and took up his duties the same month in the Nebraska Territory. The Nebraska Territory had been  created in 1854 after the repeal of the 1820 Missouri Compromise by the Kansas-Nebraska Act. This act divided the original Territory into the pro-slavery Kansas  Territory and the anti-slavery Nebraska Territory. 

The Nebraska Territory included all of Nebraska, North and South Dakota, and parts of Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming. This vast area was the original  diocese of Omaha. It was, according to Bishop O’Gorman, the poorest diocese in the United States, poor financially and poverty-stricken in its number of priests.  Hard-pressed as the frail, aging, pious bishop was, he was able, as was his successor, Bishop J. O’Connor (1876), to persuade first one and then another of the overworked priests to travel periodically to the little Battle Creek settlement even though it might mean a forty, fifty, or sixty-mile trip one-way. 

On July 20th of that year, Father Ryan of Columbus said the first Mass ever offered in Madison County in the log house of Pat O’Neill in the Battle Creek  settlement. He baptized the following children: Samuel Kent, Jr., Joseph and Eliza Keifer, E.S. O’Donnell, Mary Orr, Margaret McKerrigan, S.W. Rooney, Mary  Sheller (Shalley?) and Margaret Valmont. 

That fall, Father Ryan returned to the settlement and said Mass at the home of Pat Manning, father-in-law of Pat O’Neill, and baptized seven children: two  McMahon children, two children whose names are not recorded, and three Skala children. The original log cabin of the Skala homestead is now in the Battle Creek  Memorial Park. 

There is no further mention of Father Ryan visiting the settlement again or that the bishop appointed a replacement for him. But he may have, for in  February of 1873, Father P.F. Bedard arrived unannounced at the homestead of Philip Hughes. He said Mass on two consecutive days at the houses of Philip and Frank  Hughes. After his initial visit, Father Bedard came once a month to say Mass in various houses of horseback Catholics in the valley. When he arrived, members of the  family with whom he stayed rode horseback to the nearest Catholic neighbors to announce the day and hour of the coming Mass. These neighbors in turn rode in relays  to other Catholics of the Norfolk, Pierce, Madison, Oakdale, and Tilden settlements. 

It was under Father Bedard’s leadership that the Catholics in the valley began to organize a parish. An old record reads in part: “Madison County, Feb. 1,  1874. We the undersigned agree to pay the sum annexed to our names for the purpose of building a Catholic church in Madison County at some convenient point to be  determined at our next meeting, March 1, at the home of Pat O’Neill.” By May of that year, they had decided to build the church on a ten-acre tract adjacent to the  village of Battle Creek. James Orr, a Civil War veteran and son-in-law of Philip Hughes, gave and deeded the land to St. Patrick’s Parish for the church and a cemetery. 

J. Flannagan bought the lumber in Sioux City, Iowa and on June 1, 1874 the following men started out in their wagons to pick it up and deliver it to the  church site: John Buckley, Timothy Carrabine, Francis Corkle, James Cramer, Samuel Kent, Philip Hughes, and James Orr. For their trip, which at that time took about  six days, each man was credited with ten dollars toward his pledge for the new church. Philip Beck and John McKerrigan, experienced carpenters, were placed in  charge of building the church but it was not until the following spring that it was completed. 

Father Bedard asked Philip Hughes (as the first parishioner) to suggest a saint’s name for the church. He chose St. Patrick, and in May of 1875, Mass was  said in the first Catholic Church in Madison County, St. Patrick’s of Battle Creek. Father Bedard was transferred to Yankton, South Dakota soon after the first Mass,  but he continued to come to say Mass when he could until his death in 1876. It is sad that so little is known of this pioneer priest who did so much to keep the faith  alive in the Elkhorn Valley. 

Again the homesteaders were without the services of a priest. St. Patrick’s trustees, Frank Hughes and Samuel Kent, wrote to Bishop O’Connor on January  15, 1877. “Reverend Sir:-Would it be possible for you to send us a priest occasionally that would stir up our flock and keep the faith alive in them until such time when  we would be able to support a priest permanently. We have a church and about twenty-five families.—“ 

The Franciscans of Columbus, at the request of Bishop O’Connor, looked after the parish for about a year and it is from the records of Father Anselm Puetz  that we have the only description of St. Patrick’s first church. “Wherever I went, especially in Madison County, I had to say Mass in the most miserable little shanties--.  Well these Battle Creekers at least have a church. A rough frame structure (20 by 30 feet) without plastering. Rough boards placed over empty nail kegs serve as pews.  There was an altar frame of rough boards nailed together; red mosquito netting formed a balacchino. The confessional was without grating, but this place was a  palace.” 

Father Puetz wrote of the difficulties and hardships of the more-than-fifty-mile trip from Columbus to the Battle Creek settlement in the 1870’s, of being lost  on the prairie, of the bitter winter cold and the fury of the blinding blizzards, of the summer sun that burned his skin until it peeled off, of riding in an open wagon for  five hours drenched to the skin by the torrential rain. But he told with gratitude of the hospitality of the homesteaders and the efforts they made for his comfort, of a  family that provided him with what privacy they could at night by hanging a blanket from the ceiling around a bed in the corner of their one-room cabin. 

The hardship Father Puetz endured reflects those of the homesteaders he served. Their livestock sometimes perished in the blizzards that blinded him.  There were drought years when there was little or nothing to harvest, and the summer when clouds of grasshoppers devoured the year’s crop in one day. But the  pioneers’ faith in God and in the land, and their hard work sustained them. They were young and there was always another spring.

Sometime during the year of 1878, Father J.M. Smith succeeded the Franciscans and once a month made his way as best he could over the seventy miles  from his parish in O’Neill to Battle Creek. At the end of four years, the bishop relieved him of this arduous travel and St. Patrick’s became a mission of the newly  organized Sacred Heart parish of Norfolk, whose pastor was Father Thomas Carney. The bishop recalled Father Carney to Omaha in 1883 and transferred Father J.M.  Smith from O’Neill to Sacred Heart parish. 

So again Father Smith was in charge of Battle Creek and he and the parishioners made plans to replace the little church in the cemetery with a larger one in  the village. However, before the building was finished, Father Ferdinand Lechleitner became pastor in Norfolk, and the Battle Creek church was completed under his  direction in 1884.  

In the fall of 1885, Bishop James O’Connor came to Battle Creek and confirmed a class from Madison, Norfolk, Pierce, Tilden, and Battle Creek in the new  church. This was the first time the Sacrament of Confirmation was conferred in Madison County. Father Thomas Walsh, not long from Maynooth, replaced Father  Lechleitner in 1888. The bishop recalled him to Omaha in 1889 but reassigned him to Norfolk in 1890 as pastor. St. Patrick’s continued as one of the several missions  of the Sacred Heart Parish.  

Travel was still difficult in 1890 even though the railroad now served this section of the state, but passenger trains were few and far between. Much of  Father Walsh’s travel to his missions was done by horse and buggy, which had replaced the lumber wagons of Father Puetz’s time. And like the priests before him,  Father Walsh had to depend on the hospitality of the mission families, but the dugouts, sods, and log cabins had been replaced with more comfortable frame and brick  houses. 

There were times when Father Walsh had to depend on a member of one mission to get him to the next one. He was a stickler for schedules and a martinet  on promptness. Once when no other transportation was available, he pressed Mr. Justin McCarthy of Tilden into borrowing a hand car from the railroad to take him the  fifteen miles to Battle Creek. 

In 1900, Father Walsh and St. Patrick’s parishioners started plans for a new church. They sold the 1884 frame church and moved it to Third and Main. The  present brick church was dedicated in 1902 and stands on the site of the old one, Hale and Third Streets. The names of some of the early settlers are inscribed on its  stained glass windows: Hughes, O’Neill, Wade, Carrabine, Rooney, Skala, and Simmons. 

Michael Hughes and John Hughes, sons of the two first parishioners, were the trustees of the new church. The architect was James Stitt of Norfolk, whose  daughter Marion many years later married Frank Hughes, grandson of the pioneer Frank Hughes. 

Family names of parishioners of 1902 included: Barnes, Brink, Brown, Brozek, Connolly, Dittrick, Donnelly, Flood, Gillespie, Hughes, Kent, Kirby,  Lovelace, Lund, Magner, McCole, Orr, Preece, Risk, Richardson, Rooney, Ruzik, Severa, Seifert, Skala, Smith, Sullivan, Taylor, Wade, and Walker. St. Patrick’s was the last of the churches Father Walsh built as Pastor of Sacred Heart in Norfolk. His record as an organizer and builder is shown by what  he accomplished not only in Norfolk but also in the missions for which he was responsible for so many years. He built the present Sacred Heart church in Norfolk and a  rectory, a church in Neligh, one in Tilden, as well as the present St. Patrick’s of Battle Creek. 

Father Walsh’s years in Nebraska had been strenuous and demanding ones and in 1906 he asked the Bishop R. Scannell to relieve him of his pastorate in  Norfolk and assign him pastor of St. Patrick’s in Battle Creek. To the parishioners of St. Patrick’s this seemed at long last the realization of the hope expressed in the  petition of the forbears back in 1877 when they wrote to Bishop O’Connor “Reverend Sir: Would it be possible for you to send us a priest occasionally, until we can  support one permanently.” 

A later important event in the history of the parish was the purchase, blessing, and erection of the church bell in May of 1909. Contributions for this, as for  the various buildings, were given by businessmen of the town and by people of the parish. 

St. Patrick’s built Father Walsh a comfortable rectory in 1908 and welcomed him with warm appreciation. He was a devout priest and a highly respected  member of the community. In spite of his years, he was active as the pastor of St. Patrick’s until the day of his death in the rectory, October 26, 1938. He had shepherded this little flock for almost a half-century. He had officiated at the last rites of its old settlers, baptized their children’s children, taught  them their catechism and instructed them in the loyal observance of their responsibilities as Americans and Catholics. St. Patrick’s holds him in grateful and revered  memory. He was the last of its pioneer priests. 

Father Walsh’s successors have served the parish with energy, fervor, and credit. They have been responsible for improvements and additions to the church  and the rectory that have added to the comfort and service of both buildings. They remodeled the sanctuary of the church, modernized the confessional, enlarged the  basement and finished it as a church hall with a meeting room, kitchen, and restrooms. The reception room of the rectory is now double its original size and the heating  and lighting equipment of both buildings has been updated. In 1980, a parish hall was built on the church grounds, a joint project of St. Patrick’s and its mission, St.  Francis de Sales of Schoolcraft. Many activities are held in the hall, as well as Confraternity of Christian Doctrine classes for both parishes. In 2005, the parish  purchased a building at 306 West Main Street from Ervin and Verona Tegeler and remodeled it to add three classrooms and several storage rooms. This building, now  known as St. Patrick’s Education Center, has helped accommodate the growing needs of the religious education programs of the parish. Volunteers under the pastor’s direction have beautified the grounds surrounding the buildings with trees and shrubs.  

St. Patrick’s parish has furnished Sisters for the following religious orders: 

• Sister Mary Gabriel (Katherine O’Neill), Sisters of Charity, BVM, daughter of Patrick and Anna Manning O’Neill. 
• Mother Mary Erica (Agnes Hughes), Franciscan Order of Stella, N.Y., daughter of Michael and Margaret Beck Hughes. 
• Mother Kent (Marion Kent), Madame’s of the Sacred Heart, daughter of Samuel and Agnes Joyce Kent and granddaughter of Samuel Kent, Sr,  Sister Mary Remegius (Rose McCole), Dominican Order, daughter of James and Mary Nolan McCole. 
• Sister Mary Rosenda (Agnes Arkfeld), Sister of Charity of Xavier, Kansas, daughter of Rupert and Rose Hughes Arkfeld, great-granddaughter of  Philip Hughes. 

The first and only priest the parish has provided was Father Richard Arkfeld, son of Rupert and Rose Hughes Arkfeld, and great-grandson of Philip Hughes.  Father Arkfeld served the diocese for 34 years. He was admired by non-Catholics as well as Catholics. He entered his eternal reward on October 15, 1996 and is buried  in St. Patrick’s Cemetery. 

Tom Hughes, son of Jerry and Nancy Hughes and great-great-grandson of Philip Hughes, was ordained a permanent Deacon in 1998. Mel Schaecher was ordained a permanent Deacon in 2011. 

From a handful of Catholics in 1875, this parish had grown to 130 families at the beginning of the new millennium. From the beginning of the settlement  and the incorporation of the village, St. Patrick’s parishioners have been active in community and civic affairs. One of the four founders of the village was Patrick  O’Neill.  

When Battle Creek was preparing to celebrate its centennial in 1967, the committee wrote to his daughter, Sister M. Gabriel in Chicago, asking about her  father’s life in Nebraska. In the final paragraph of her reply she wrote, “It is only as I grow older, very old in fact, that I appreciate the life and hope and dreams and  courage which inspired my father from the time he ran away from home in Ireland before finishing school, through Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere, until he  established a home in Nebraska – he devoted himself to our needs and our education, and our respect for him was unlimited.” As she ended her letter, it might be as  spokesman for other daughters and for sons of more than a hundred years of the parish, an expression of gratitude for the fathers and mothers and the pastors of St.  Patrick’s: “The treasure that he cherished most from his home in Galway through all his wanderings was his faith. That also is our most treasured inheritance.”