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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Landmarks: Former St. Michael Mission chapel preserved at new location

There is an old wooden chapel that sits quietly in the woods just a short walk west of the Commons building on the campus of Mukogawa Fort Wright Institute.

Dwarfed by the large ponderosas surrounding it, this little chapel began its existence many miles away on the Peone Prairie as part of the St. Michael Mission, the outreach to the Spokane Tribe begun in the 1860s by the Jesuit order of the Roman Catholic Church. The chapel was relocated in 1968 to its present site in an effort to preserve it.

But to go back to the beginning – the Rev. Joseph Cataldo opened the first St. Michael Mission on the southern perimeter of the prairie in 1866, said David Kingma, archivist for the Oregon Province of Jesuits located at Gonzaga University, who notes that historical records do contain some conflicting dates. The Peone Prairie area had previously been visited by the Rev. Joseph Caruana, who had erected a temporary structure at the site.

As part of the St. Michael Mission outreach a frame chapel and log residence were built in 1882 by Brother Achilles Carfagno on Palmer Road north of Bigelow Gulch, about 2 miles south of where the original mission was constructed. They functioned as a meeting house, school, church and living shelter. When the Spokane Indian Reservation was established in 1887, most of the Indians served by the mission gradually began moving to that or other reservations, including the Coeur d’Alene Reservation, and the site ceased to be an Indian mission, Kingma said. Tribal members did return to visit on Easter and intermittently throughout the year.

In 1920, Jesuit scholastic students renovated the chapel building, which by that time was primarily used for pioneer families in the area. There was no resident pastor, just priests assigned to visit from Gonzaga’s Jesuit community. The last Catholic Mass was held on site in 1924, and in 1936 a granite marker was put in place to commemorate it as an historical site. In 1943 the chapel was formally closed.

Weather, vandalism and the remote location took their toll on the chapel. In 1960, the Sisters of the Holy Names established Fort Wright College on the 76 acres of land that had previously been the Fort George Wright military cavalry post west of downtown Spokane. In 1967, Sister Mary E. Dunton and the Fort Wright Museum Board secured permission to relocate the chapel to its present location, now 4000 W. Randolph Road, in an effort to save it.

The move took place the next year, though Kingma notes there was public protest over the move because some local residents believed the chapel had been deeded to the state and wanted it to stay at the Palmer Road location.

Some renovations to the structure were done, and the first Mass since 1924 was held there on May 25, 1969. By 1982, Fort Wright College closed, and moving the chapel once again was considered, perhaps to the campus of Gonzaga University or back to the original location. That conversation continued through the 1980s, Kingma said.

But in 1990, Mukogawa Gakuin of Japan purchased the site from the Sisters of the Holy Names and established Mukogawa Fort Wright Institute as a branch campus of its women’s university there – and took responsibility for the chapel as well. Additional restoration work was done, including repainting inside and out, putting on a new roof, bringing electricity to the building and installing a pellet stove for heat when the building is in use during colder months. Historic photos line the walls.

The institute’s maintenance department built new wooden pews for the chapel and continues taking care of the structure’s needs, one of the greatest of which is keeping it critter-free, as squirrels scamper on the roof and raccoons burrow underneath. But that’s life in the woods.

A handful of days each year the chapel is rented out, and small wedding celebrations are held there. But mostly the little chapel stands quietly in the protected woods at Mukogawa, a preserved artifact of an older mission outreach – still an important piece of Spokane history.