NEWCASTLE – The oldest continuing parish north of St. Augustine, Fla., and the first in the nation to be named for St. Patrick will hold its bicentennial celebration this weekend in Newcastle. St. Patrick Catholic Church will hold activities to mark the completion of its first church building in 1808 and to honor the community’s founders.

Festivities will begin at noon Saturday with the ringing of the church bell, one of the last church bells cast by Paul Revere before his death in November 1818, followed by tours of the church. A tour of the historic church cemetery will start at 2:30 p.m. and include the life stories of the state’s first political movers and shakers told in the first person by costumed parishioners standing over the graves of those political elite.

Activities Saturday will conclude with a Mass at 4 p.m. celebrated by Bishop Richard J. Malone in the modern $2 million church completed in 2004. The weekend’s events will culminate Sunday with a Latin Mass conducted in the original church building.

Much of the planning for the weekend celebration has been done by the Shamrocks, St. Patrick’s women’s group. Other activities to mark the bicentennial are planned through Columbus Day weekend, Carrie Watson of Boothbay, who has been working with others since March on plans for the bicentennial, said Tuesday. She added that the program was designed to appeal to history buffs as well as Catholics intrigued by the state’s religious heritage.

“From a historical viewpoint, anyone interested in any kind of history would find the story of the oldest Catholic Church in the state fascinating,” she said. “And in terms the architecture and structure of building, I would think people interested in those things would be interested in hearing details about its construction to learn how it’s lasted so long.”

The original small brick church sits on a hill and overlooks the Damariscotta River on the old road from Newcastle to Damariscotta Mills. It is the oldest Catholic parish (outside Indian mission churches) on the Atlantic Seaboard north of St. Augustine that is still being used. St. Patrick’s roots are intertwined with the early settlers who established a community and made their fortunes on a venture known as Damariscotta Mills.

James Kavanagh and Matthew Cottrill immigrated to Boston from County Wexford, Ireland, when they were 24 and 18, respectively. In the late 1790s, the pair migrated to Newcastle, attracted by stories of water power, timber and shipbuilding facilities. As the new century began, they bought a 567-acre tract that gave them control of the water rights at Damariscotta Lake, and opened a mill and shipyard.

The Rev. John Lefevre de Cheverus celebrated the first Mass in the area in 1798 on his way back to Boston from his missionary labors with the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy Indians. That same year a small wooden chapel, St. Mary’s of the Mills, was built at Damariscotta Mills in Newcastle on land donated by Cottrill. It has not survived.

Cheverus left instructions for daily and Sunday devotions to be practiced in his long absences. Morning and evening prayers were to be offered with worshippers on their knees. On Sundays and holy day mornings, prayers, the Epistle and Gospel of the Mass and other devotions were to be said. In the afternoon, a vesper service with the Litany and prescribed chapter from “The Poor Man’s Catechism” was to be performed. He also warned them against joining in public worship with people of other faiths.

Construction on a church began less than a decade later and was completed in 1808. The architect, Nicholas Codd, who also designed homes for Kavanagh and Cottrill, was reputed to have been shanghaied from Ireland to design the structures.

Codd designed St. Patrick’s for solidity and endurance. The walls of the church, in the early Federal style, are 11/2 feet thick. The small, odd-shaped bricks were made across the lake and hauled by oxen on the ice during the winter of 1807. Lime was imported from Ireland and made into mortar on site.

The original pews were backless plank benches, hewn from the nearby forests. As was the custom of the day, the women sat on the Epistle side (the right-hand side), the men on the Gospel side of the church. The unique altar, built in the form of a tomb, is older than the church and is the original altar at which Father Cheverus offered Mass.

Despite the fact that the offspring of Kavanagh and Cottrill became prominent residents in Maine, the church did not have a full-time pastor until 1932. The congregation grew slowly and weathered many changes, but the greatest impact on the church was the result of the influx of summer visitors.

In the mid-1960s the Rev. Edward O’Brien oversaw construction of the outdoor altar that enables the church to serve the many visitors to the peninsula. Nearly 1,000 people attend weekend Masses at the “chapel in the pines.” The parking spaces directly behind the last row of “pews” is reserved for the handicapped so they can attend church without leaving their cars.

In 2004, a new $2 million dollar church connecting the original building and the 1987 parish hall was constructed after the parish grew threefold to 440 families from 1995 to 2004. The new building has an elevator and is handicapped-accessible.

Watson said the weekend program would honor the spirit of its founder.

“Father Chevrus,” she said, “was the inspiration for the building of the church. It’s been said that many times when he preached here, the congregation was filled with as many non-Catholic as Catholics. It didn’t matter to him what denomination people were. He might have been one of the world’s first ecumenical priests, even though he wouldn’t have used that word.”

For more information about the bicentennial, call St. Patrick Catholic Church, 563-3240, or visit the church Web site at www.stpatricksnewcastle.com.

jharrison@bangordailynews.net

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