BY JANE MEGGITT
Staff Writer
JEFF GRANIT staff St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church on Sweetmans Lane celebrates 125 years this month. The new building was built nearby on Stillhouse Road. MILLSTONE — For 125 years, St. Joseph’s Church has been serving the Catholic community faithfully in the township and surrounding areas.
A special Mass in honor of the anniversary and a celebration afterward was offered at the new St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church on Stillhouse Road on Saturday.
Thomas McCaffery, Millstone, has been a member of the church for all of his 68 years. His great-grandfather, Michael Beirne, donated the land on Sweetmans Lane where the original church was built back in 1879. Beirne died in 1884, and was the first to be interred at the cemetery.
During the 1940s, when McCaffery served as an altar boy, there was only one Mass on Sunday at 9:30 a.m., and perhaps 75 people would be in attendance.
Today, the parish consists of 1,600 families. McCaffery noted that the church really started to grow within the past 10-15 years, as new developments sprang up all over Millstone.
A history written for the church’s centennial in 1979 gives a deed description as “the property began at a stone in the line of John Ottinger’s woodland on the public highway, Sweetmans Lane, leading from Charleston Springs to William P. Forman’s premises and the corner of Martin Nolan’s farm…”
Before the church was built, Catholics had their religious services in private homes or in churches in Freehold and Princeton. Mass would be celebrated once a month in Perrineville homes. During the Civil War years, according to this history, there was an influx of Irish immigrants to the Perrineville area, who found work as farm laborers.
The original church was a small brick and terra cotta structure of neo-Gothic design, measuring 30 feet by 55 feet. It could seat 250 people, and cost $2,500 to build.
On Dec. 28, 1879, the first Mass was celebrated by the Rev. Frederick Kiviletz, the resident pastor of St. Rose of Lima Church in Freehold.
The following year, St. Joseph’s became a mission of the St. James Church in Jamesburg.
In 1886, William Forman and Martin and Bridget Nolan each donated an acre of ground north of the church for a cemetery.
In the days of horse-drawn vehicles, there were 12 carriage sheds behind the cemetery. These sheds were rented to parishioners and the family’s name was affixed to them. Less well-to-do communicants tied their horses to trees in the churchyard.
In 1888, Nolan donated an additional acre in the hopes of fulfilling his late wife’s wish to have a dwelling house on the church grounds.
In 1885, St. Joseph’s became a parish in its own right, with the Rev. Bartholomew Carey as its pastor. He was the first and only resident pastor until the Rev. Michael Lang came to the church earlier this year.
Carey’s house was adjacent to the church, on what is now the parking lot.
When he left in 1891, the rectory was moved, but exactly where it went remains a matter of conjecture, according to the centennial history. It may have been destroyed by fire, or it may have still been standing [in 1979] on the nearby Scotto farm.
In 1906, St. Joseph’s was transferred to St. Anthony’s in Hightstown as a mission church, and remained so for the next 40 years.
In 1948, St. Joseph’s became affiliated with Our Lady of Mercy Church in Englishtown as a mission church.
In 1971, the Rev. Charles Valentine was named pastor of Our Lady of Mercy and St. Joseph’s.
Valentine retired earlier this year, having overseen the construction of the new church building on Stillhouse Road in 2001.