St. Thomas Aquinas Church

St. Thomas Aquinas Church is a historic church at 130 N. 5th Street in Zanesville, Ohio. It was built in 1842 and added to the National Register in 1980. The parish was under the care of the Order of Preachers until August 2017. The parish is now staffed by the clergy of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Columbus.

In the spring of 1819, Fr. Nicholas Young celebrated the first private Mass in Zanesville in the upstairs at the Green Tree Tavern owned by John Dugan. In November 1820, Dugan purchased a brick warehouse for public Masses, renaming it Trinity Church. When the parish outgrew the converted warehouse, Dugan purchased the lot on which St. Thomas Church is now constructed. To be named St. John Church, the cruciform building’s cornerstone was laid on March 4, 1825. Dugan died in Maryland while escorting Bishop Edward Fenwick, Fr. Young, and Fr. Gabriel Richard. His grave under St. Thomas Aquinas Church is marked with a cross on the floor. During the 1840s, the congregation outgrew St. John Church and needed a new building. Zanesville’s Protestant community contributed funding; local Quaker, John Howard, donated stone from his property. St. John Church was demolished and the cornerstone for St. Thomas Aquinas Church was laid on March 17, 1842. Construction costs for the English Gothic structure was $40,000. The first Mass was celebrated on Christmas 1842. On June 16, 1912, a tornado collapsed the church steeple into the nave during morning Mass, killing three people and injuring twenty-eight. The next year, the Muskingum River flooded, further damaging the church. The parish raised approximately $25,000 to repair the building. The parish ordered new pictorial stained glass windows from Joseph Osterrath of Liège, Belgium in 1914, but order fulfillment was delayed until after the end of World War I.

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