St. Patrick's Church in Lowell, Massachusetts

Lowell, Massachusetts

Lowell is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, USA. According to the 2010 census, the city's population was 106,519. It is the fourth largest city in the state. Lowell and Cambridge are the county seats of Middlesex County...

 is an historic Roman Catholic church, traditionally associated with the city's Irish American

Irish American

Irish Americans are citizens of the United States who can trace their ancestry to Ireland. A total of 36,278,332 Americans—estimated at 11.9% of the total population—reported Irish ancestry in the 2008 American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau...

 population. The parish's foundation date of 1831 makes it one of the oldest Catholic parishes north of Boston in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

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History

The original Saint Patrick's church was built in 1831 to support the Irish workmen who had moved to Lowell, largely to work on the Pawtucket

Pawtucket Canal

Completed in 1796, the Pawtucket Canal was originally built as a transportation canal to circumvent the Pawtucket Falls of the Merrimack River in East Chelmsford, Massachusetts. In the early 1820s it became a major component of the Lowell power canal system...

 and Merrimack

Merrimack Canal

The Merrimack Canal is a power canal in Lowell, Massachusetts. The canal, dug in the 1820s, begins at the Pawtucket Canal just above Swamp Locks, and empties into the Merrimack River near the Boott Cotton Mills...

 Canals. The donated land the simple wooden church was built on was an acre

Acre

The acre is a unit of area in a number of different systems, including the imperial and U.S. customary systems. The most commonly used acres today are the international acre and, in the United States, the survey acre. The most common use of the acre is to measure tracts of land.The acre is related...

 in area, giving name to the Acre neighborhood the church is located in today. The current stone structure dates to 1853, although a fire in 1904 caused much of the church to be rebuilt by 1906.

Saint Patrick's today

Today, the church is on the List of Registered Historic Places in Lowell, Massachusetts. In addition to the traditional Irish and French Canadian

French Canadian

French Canadian or Francophone Canadian, , generally refers to the descendents of French colonists who arrived in New France in the 17th and 18th centuries...

 congregations, the parish, including its school, serves local Southeast Asians, specificially with Vietnamese

Vietnamese language

Vietnamese is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese. It is also spoken as a second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam...

 and Cambodian

Khmer people

Khmer people are the predominant ethnic group in Cambodia, accounting for approximately 90% of the 14.8 million people in the country. They speak the Khmer language, which is part of the larger Mon–Khmer language family found throughout Southeast Asia...

 native-language Masses

Mass (liturgy)

"Mass" is one of the names by which the sacrament of the Eucharist is called in the Roman Catholic Church: others are "Eucharist", the "Lord's Supper", the "Breaking of Bread", the "Eucharistic assembly ", the "memorial of the Lord's Passion and Resurrection", the "Holy Sacrifice", the "Holy and...

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External links

• http://www.stpatricklowell.org/display_template/welcome.cfm - Saint Patrick's Church
• http://ecommunity.uml.edu/lhs/ - Lowell Historical Society