Name This Peoria Landmark

Peoria Landmark #299

I couldn’t find any information on the carving, but here’s some info on the church courtesy of Genealogy Trails.com:

Father John Blaise Raho, the first priest assigned to serve the settlers of the area indicates in his letter that the corner stone was laid on August 4, 1839. [...]

The church ground and the cemetery that surrounds it was donated by William Patrick Mulveny, a native of Dublin, Ireland. His grave lies a few feet South of the church. The church was built by the men and women of Kickapoo. timbers were hand hewed and pegged. the sandstone was quarried near Joliet, Illinois and hauled by oxen cart to Kickapoo. The stone was laid by men and the mortar was mixed by the women.

St. Patrick’s Church remained the only Catholic Church in the area until 1861. At that time the German Catholics purchased a former Episcopalian Church in the Village of Kickapoo. this became St. Mary’s Church. Mass was offered in both churches until 1921 when the present St. Mary’s Church of Kickapoo was built. the two parishes were then combined and Mass was no longer offered in St. Patrick’s Church on a regular basis.

St. Patrick’s Church was abandoned and allowed to deteriorate until the early 1960’s. At that time the Bishop Rosati Council, Knights of Columbus, in cooperation with several other Knights of Columbus Councils in Central Illinois, requested permission from Bishop John Franz, then Bishop of Peoria, to begin a restoration program for the church. Bishop Franz granted permission and the many back breaking hours for the men who volunteered their time and talent began. The restoration program took three years and two months to complete. On the Feast of All Saints, November 1, 1964 a rededication ceremony was held.

The 1938 cemetery is also the first Catholic Cemetery in Peoria County.

Thanks to NoLemon and Billy Dennis.

A fellow encountered a bear in a wasteland. There was nobody else there. Both were frightened and ran away. Fellow to the north, bear to the west. Suddenly the fellow stopped, aimed his gun to the south and shot the bear. What color was the bear?

Sign for Wildlife Prairie on Route 150 in Kickapoo, and the bear was indeed shot at the North Pole, therefore was a White Polar Bear.

I’m going to take a leap of faith here and assume that the town of Kickapoo was named after the Kickapoo Indians. Here’s a brief history of their time in Illinois courtesy of NativeAmericans.com:

“Kickapoo Native North Americans, whose language belongs to the Algonquian branch of the Algonquian-Wakashan linguistic stock and who in the late 17th cent. occupied SW Wisconsin. They were closely related to the Sac and Fox. The culture of the Kickapoo was essentially that of the Eastern Woodlands area, but they also hunted buffalo, one of the few traits that the Kickapoo adopted from their neighbors in the Plains area. After the allied Kickapoo, Ojibwa, Ottawa, Potawatomi, and Sac and Fox tribes massacred (c.1769) the Illinois, they partitioned the Illinois territory. The Kickapoo, numbering about 3,000, moved south to central Illinois. Later they split in two; the Vermilion group settled on the Vermilion River, a tributary of the Wabash, and the Prairie group on the Sangamon River. The Kickapoo, a power in the region, sided with the British in the American Revolution and in the War of 1812, when they aided the Shawnee chief Tecumseh. By the Treaty of Edwardsville (1819) the Kickapoo ceded all their lands in Illinois to the United States.”