The Log Church Still Standing in Cahokia

Cahokia, Illinois — St. Clair County

When Father Paul de St. Pierre came out to Cahokia from Baltimore in 1786, there was no church for him to walk into. The old French mission church had disappeared, and services were being held in a rented room. Work on a new church began that year or the next. It was completed and dedicated in September 1799, and it is still standing on East First Street, across the Mississippi from St. Louis.

The mission and the gap

Cahokia is older than the building. Priests from the Seminary of Quebec planted a mission here in March 1699. That mission ended in 1767–68, when the last of its priests, Abbé Forget du Verger, left. The church on East First Street is not the 1699 mission church. It is the one the town built after that mission had ended and its church was gone.

Posts on a sill

The French method is called poteaux sur sole, posts on a sill. A National Park Service survey of the church describes hewn black walnut timbers, each a foot wide, six inches thick and 14 feet high, stood upright about a foot apart on heavy timber sills. The spaces between them were filled with rubble stone set in clay. The outside walls slope inward about five inches. The same survey calls the church the finest surviving example in the United States of a French Colonial church of upright logs, a kind of building that was once common.

Covered up, then uncovered

The log church was the parish church until 1891, when a stone church was finished beside it. The older building became a parish school and hall. In the 1890s its log walls were covered with siding to protect them from the weather.

For the 250th anniversary of the town and of Holy Family Parish, private donations paid for a restoration, carried out in 1949–51. The building was jacked up and its foundations repaired. The siding came off, which put the upright logs back in view. A metal roof was replaced with wood shingles, and a small belfry was added.

Today

In August 2024 the Belleville Messenger reported that Holy Family had marked its 325th anniversary with tours, a Mass celebrated by Bishop Michael McGovern, and a dinner. The village around the church, the paper noted, is now called Cahokia Heights.

If you have visited the log church, or if your family has a story there, we would like to hear it.

Top photo: The Holy Family log church on East First Street in Cahokia, September 5, 2011. Photo: Kbh3rd, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Cropped and resized from the original to 1,200 × 630 pixels. Both photos on this page are adapted from the originals and are shared under the same CC BY-SA 3.0 license. History from the National Park Service’s National Survey of Historic Sites and Buildings report on the Church of the Holy Family and the Belleville Messenger, August 13, 2024.