“Smallest Church in USA"
This is Decker’s Chapel in the town of St. Marys, Pennsylvania. As the old postcard at top claims, it is the smallest church in USA.
It was built in 1856 by Michael Decker, a German immigrant, whose son, Michael Decker, Jr., became a well-known priest - first of the Diocese of Brooklyn, NY and later, of the Diocese of Erie, Pennsylvania.
The chapel was restored in 1928 by the Knights of Columbus and is now maintained by the Elk County Historical Society.
I wrote a profile of the Decker family, and the little chapel for the Fall 2021 issue of “Gathered Fragments,” the annual journal of the Catholic Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania. You can find it, courtesy of the Duquesne Scholarship Collection, by clicking here.
I hope you’ll take a look - it’s a fascinating story and you’ll find several more photos.
The brief history of the origin of the chapel is this:
One day, while working in his orchard, the elder Michael Decker fell from a tree and injured his back. Deeply religious, he vowed that if the injury healed he would build and maintain a chapel. The injury did heal and the little wayside place of worship became a landmark of Elk County.[i]
Among other traditional practices, the Bavarians who settled St. Marys erected crosses and chapels along roads and paths in celebration of their religious convictions and to commemorate specific events. Within the St. Marys environs several of these wayside shrines once dotted the cultural landscape of the community and were tangible reminders of the relationships which the emigrants had forged with their God. Among these were a chapel of bark, erected by a lay brother of St. Joseph's Monastery on the side of Cross Road, a large cross for which that road was named, a chapel on the Gross farm on Windfall Road, and Decker's Chapel on the road to DuBois. Only Decker's Chapel survives as a wayside reflection from those early days of fervent frontier Catholicism.[ii]
[i] http://www.elkcountyhistoricalsociety.org/deckerschapel.html
[ii]United States Department of the Interior, National Park Service, National Register of Historic Places, Pennsylvania SP Decker’s Chapel at https://catalog.archives.gov/id/71998254