The congregation started to arrive at the usual time, about half an hour before Mass on a recent Saturday afternoon, the old church slowly filling with the descendants and caretakers of a place of great serenity but also great loss. It is a place, these days, that is mostly empty. Desolate. Nature has reclaimed Kaskaskia, the site of Illinois’ founding and its first capital, one flood at a time.
Usually, the town’s namesake island, far down in downstate Illinois, is quiet enough to hear the hum of the barges droning along the Mississippi River. It is quiet enough that the silence, itself, is a kind of noise. It is the only part of Illinois west of the Mississippi, a geographical oddity that reflects the current’s power and unpredictability. The river gave the place life before taking it back.
The history in Kaskaskia is as rich as the soil that attracted settlers in the first place and made it, for a time, Illinois’ most important place. There is a Liberty Bell, a gift from King Louis XV of France, that predates the larger and more famous one in Philadelphia, and there’s an American story that predates America’s founding 250 years ago. There’s not much of anything else, aside from the ghosts and the church, its survival a testament to the people who keep it going.
The Immaculate Conception Chapel, a brick Catholic church with a steep spire that has served as a beacon in rising waters, is not dissimilar to the land where it sits. Both exist in spite of the odds, symbols of perseverance and community — memorials to those who fought to establish a new country and a new state, and who happened to do it in a place that proved particularly untamable.
A long time ago, more than 7,000 people lived along the river in and around Kaskaskia. It was a hub in America’s westward expansion, a trading post in French Colonial Illinois, an American Revolution battleground and, in the early 1800s, an important stop for Lewis and Clark. It was the capital of the Illinois Territory and where the state constitution was written and, when Illinois gained entry into the Union in 1818, Kaskaskia remained the capital for almost two years.
It might’ve been St. Louis, before St. Louis, if not for the whims of the Mississippi. A flood in 1844 covered the town in 5 feet of water and another, in 1881, changed the course of the river so that Kaskaskia became an island. The population dwindled and the town withered. And in 1993, after many more floods, the Mississippi swelled again, this time with memorable cruelty.
Not many people were left by then but Stanley Hurst was, raising four children on the same land where he’d been born and grown up. On the same land where his father had been born and grown up. In the summer of 1993, when the Mississippi breached the levee and the water poured in, when the river did what it has always done and when the rescue boats arrived and when some of the last residents lost their homes, Hurst lost the last of his illusions.
“I said, ‘No more of this,’” he said while he walked into Immaculate Conception on the second-to-last Saturday in May. Hurst in ‘93 was among the first inside the church upon the flooding, which lifted the pews off the floor and toppled the statues and rose high enough, more than 9 feet, to fill the pulpit. In the days that followed he moved to St. Mary, nearby.
“On top of a hill now,” he said, but part of him never left the island.
Most every weekend, Hurst returns to Kaskaskia, part of an aging congregation whose faith is the only thing that doesn’t remain in danger of washing away. Immaculate Conception hosts one Mass per week, on Saturday afternoons at 3:30. For an hour or two, the island comes to life again. The congregation gathers near where some of their homes used to be — in the chapel where some married or mourned loved ones who spent their entire lives here, who refused to leave.
There are other churches. Hurst lives just down the street from one.
But that church isn’t this church.
“This is my roots, right here,” he said with some defiance, and with that he stepped inside.
**
Mary Ellen Brown, 68, stood in the back of the chapel and greeted those who walked inside, toward their usual pews, while Emily Lyons, almost 90, maneuvered her walker through the worn wooden doors. Like Hurst, they grew up on the island and in the church and, like Hurst, they now feel a responsibility to tend to what’s left, even if what’s left is mostly spirits.
The spirits, at least, “are friendly,” Lyons wrote 25 years ago in a welcome-to-Kaskaskia booklet that sold for $1 in the back of the chapel. The pages contained everything to know, all the history of the island and the church. Both Brown and Lyons’ roots here go back generations. Brown was married at the church altar in the spring of ‘93, months before that calamitous summer. Lyons taught in the island elementary school for more than 20 years, until there were no more students to teach.
Now they are both something like historians, eager to pass down the past. They have come to see it as mission work, in a way, with a calling to do it while they still can.
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“I know time’s going to get us,” Brown said during an impromptu tour before Mass. And then who will know Kaskaskia as well as they do? Both Brown and Lyons can recite the history by heart. They know the story behind the beams and windows of the chapel; that the altar dates to the 1730s and the original church building; that a chalice goes back to Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette’s founding of the parish in the 1670s, near Starved Rock. They can see the Virgin Mary and Joseph submerged in the flood of ‘93 and they can remember those who came to the rescue, who kept everything going.
It is a place that has proven difficult, though, to keep anything going for all that long. The river has pushed away even the most resilient, leaving behind 22 people who live in Kaskaskia, according to the census. A drive around the island is enough to convince anyone that the census must be wrong. That there can’t possibly be as many as 22 who remain.
Outside of Saturday afternoon Mass, there’s little break to the solitude. A long time can pass between the sight of a moving vehicle, or another person. A few hours before the church opened on the Saturday over Memorial Day weekend, a man named Warren Gendron and his wife, Kathy, pulled into the cemetery off of a long, flat road and left flowers on the tombstones of their relatives.
Gendron said his ancestors were among the first outsiders to settle the island in the 1700s, when three brothers, fur traders all, left Canada and followed the Mississippi south. One stopped before making it to Kaskaskia, which the French named after the Indigenous people who first lived there, and one went farther, to New Orleans. But family legend has it that the one brother who settled on the island married a Native American and began a long line of Gendrons.
“That’s my grandma and grandpa; that’s my great-grandma and great-grandpa,” Gendron said, pointing out the graves, and he said there’d been some years when he’d come out to leave flowers and couldn’t, because the cemetery had been underwater. It was not an easy place to live or, at times, to come and remember.
A couple of miles from the cemetery, a large group had gathered outside a small house for a holiday weekend cookout. People drank beer and fried fish in memory of a local who’d died the previous fall, but part of it, too, was about bringing family and friends back to the island.
“Coming here is a great reset, you know?” said Derick DeRousse, who’d traveled from Florida. The home where everyone gathered once belonged to his great-grandmother, and he was a toddler when everything flooded in 1993. After that, his relatives filled the basement with rocks. He grew up with tales of the flood but nonetheless remains drawn to the island and the quiet.
“We come here, time stops,” he said.
Time has not stood still as much as it has gone in reverse. There is not a single stoplight on the island, and not much need for stop signs. There used to be a school, but no more. There used to be a store, decades ago, and a small gas station. Now in the grass field where they used to stand there’s no trace of either. Old homes have disappeared into empty lots.
To arrive at the first capital of Illinois, a visitor must leave the state, cross a bridge and enter through Missouri. Kaskaskia is northeast across the Mississippi from Chester, where the creator of the “Popeye” comic strip is from, and where all manner of Popeye fanfare line downtown streets. More directly across the river is the Menard Correctional Center, the oldest and largest prison in Illinois, and just up the bluff from there is Fort Kaskaskia, high above the Mississippi.
The site commemorates the original town of Kaskaskia and its role in supporting George Rogers Clark’s capture of it during the American Revolution. When that happened, on July 4, 1778, locals rang the old bell, which had been delivered up the Mississippi from New Orleans, and for a long time locals stored the bell inside the church.
Nowadays, almost nothing remains of Kaskaskia as it was then. The homes and buildings that made up the town in its earliest days long ago washed away. Not even foundations are visible, and a long gravel road toward that part of the island leads past occasional farms and vast swaths of emptiness and then, finally, to a muddy riverbank thick with mosquitos.
History has long been lost in the mud, and only two remnants survive from what the locals know as “old town.” The bell is one. The other is the church. After the flood of 1881, another followed 13 years later. Kaskaskia’s dwindling number of citizens moved inland, to the center of the island. They took apart the church one brick at a time, and in 1894 reconstructed it in its current location.
Almost 100 years later, Stanley Hurst and others surveyed the damage after the Mississippi receded. They began the long process of another rebuild, and cleared the chapel pew by waterlogged pew. He and Brown and Lyons, among a few others, committed themselves then to the restoration, and to keeping the church alive.
It is a commitment, as much to each other as to their faith, that has not relented.
**
The Rev. Vincent Obi arrived in the moments before Mass and prepared himself in the back of the church while an altar boy and altar girl slipped long white robes over their heads and readied for the processional down the aisle. A few late-arrivers made their way inside and by the time the service began, at 3:30 sharp, the pews were pretty much full.
On any given Saturday, 100 people or more might show up. On Easter or Christmas, it’s often standing room only. On this particular afternoon, worship began with an opening hymn that Brown led from the back, a one-woman choir. The sound of “Come, Holy Ghost” soon filled the chapel, and moments later Lyons rose from her seat near the front to recite the first reading.
That the ritual continues Saturday after Saturday, year after year, is its own kind of small miracle. After 1993, the future of the church remained unsettled for a while. Debate emerged about what to do with a place of such historical and cultural significance, but one that nonetheless will always be susceptible to the Mississippi. Amid the talk, Stanley Hurst and others went to work.
They gutted the place by hand and then, little by little, restored what could be restored. The old stations of the cross had to be redone. The statue of Joseph needed new feet. The pulpit, submerged in water, needed saving. A giant scrapbook near the back of the chapel details it all. It’s full of obituaries for people who lived and died on the island, and pictures of the church in the aftermath of ‘93. The damage was enough to shake the belief of even the most faithful.
And then, by prayer and will, locals forced a resurrection.
The rebirth did not come without a fight. During the long months of recovery after the flood, Brown and Lyons, among others, lobbied the Diocese of Belleville to keep the church alive. Locals “made a deal,” Brown said, with then Bishop Wilton Gregory — a native of the South Side of Chicago who became bishop in 1994 — to help maintain the church in exchange for support.
The question has always lingered, though, of why it continues to exist. And how, on an otherwise mostly abandoned island, in a place that is especially difficult to reach, there can be enough faith to support the church and its weekly Mass. And yet there is, Saturday after Saturday.
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“We’ve kept up our end of the bargain,” Brown said, though she acknowledged it has not been easy. The congregation been tested over the years, and has had to continue to prove itself. At the time of the 1993 flood, the church’s priest, the Rev. Mike Cooney, had only been in place for a few weeks. Brown and others had to vouch for their small community, to keep weekly services intact.
More recently, the Rev. Steve Poole, who died in April, continued to make the case. Not long before he died, Poole advocated for the church in the days after Godfrey Mullen became the diocese’s new bishop, in March. Brown during her tour was eager to share the crux of Poole’s argument in support of Immaculate Conception:
“Think of it as a historic site that has Mass every week.”
More than 30 years have passed since then and the number of people with deep ties to the island continues to shrink. Brown has come to realize, too, that “some of the younger ones aren’t going to do what we’ve done.” Those still around, like Hurst, view church not only as an expression of faith but of pride for their homeland. He comes back week after week “because I love it here,” he said, even if the land doesn’t love anyone back.
“And it’s my church. And I ain’t gonna give it up.”
There is the reality, though, that when the time comes neither he nor anyone else will have a choice in the matter. The history of Kaskaskia is full of stories of resilience and stubborn pride, but also of the inevitability of nature. The river has risen again and again, and in 1993, the Mississippi did not go over the levee, at first, but under it, burrowing a tunnel like a prisoner seeking freedom.
For more than 100 years, people have tried to sequester it and tame it and outsmart it, and for more than 100 years the Mississippi has found its own way. The only things keeping Kaskaskia from transforming into a complete ghost town are the richness of the land, too alluring not to farm, and the church. But for how much longer? On the island, at least, there’s nowhere else to go.
“There’s always worry,” Brown said. “There’s never not worry.” And at times members of the congregation thank her and others for casting aside those anxieties and keeping this place going. Others, she acknowledged, don’t understand. She recalled a co-worker who once asked why she spent so much time in Kaskaskia because “there’s nothing over there.”
And all Brown could think was: “You just don’t see it. There’s three centuries” of history.
When Mass ended, she resumed her place at the back of the center aisle and bid farewells. The altar boy and altar girl pulled off their robes while Obi, the priest, and Lyons slowly made their way outside. The pews emptied while the church bells rang and when they stopped, and when the last members of the congregation had gone on their way, all was quiet again.