St. Barbara's Catholic Church

🏛️The era

In the late nineteenth century, industrial America ran on coal. It powered locomotives, factories and cities, and mining companies built whole towns around their mines. Thurber, in Erath County, was one of Texas's most remarkable examples: a company town that grew up around coal mining and later brickmaking, owned and run by the company that employed its workers.

The mines needed labor, and much of it came from abroad. In the Gilded Age, immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and elsewhere poured into American mining and industrial towns. According to the marker, Thurber's workforce represented eighteen nationalities, which made this small Texas town one of the most diverse places in the state.

Thurber did not last. In the twentieth century, railroads and industry moved from coal to oil, and the town's reason for existing faded. By the 1930s it was being dismantled: houses and buildings were moved or torn down, and a once-busy town was nearly emptied.

👥People & events

Most of Thurber's immigrant population was Catholic. In the early years, missionary priests came to serve them, traveling in to say Mass and give the sacraments to a community with no church of its own. That changed in 1892, when the coal company built a Catholic church at the bottom of graveyard hill.

The church was first named St. Thuribus. It was later renamed St. Barbara's in honor of the patron saint of miners, a fitting choice for men who worked underground. Catholic miners in many countries have long called on St. Barbara for protection from the dangers below the surface.

The parish also served the next generation. A church school, Hunter Academy, operated from 1894 to 1923 and educated the children of immigrant families in a town where many households spoke languages other than English. For three decades the church and school sat close to the center of Thurber's family and community life.

The building's own journey is the most striking part of the story. When Thurber was dismantled in the 1930s, the church was moved two miles north to Mingus. It stayed there for about sixty years, until Thurber preservationists brought it back in 1993.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

St. Barbara's tells, in miniature, the story of American industrialization and the immigrants who made it possible. Across the country, coal and steel towns drew workers from dozens of nations, and churches like this one were often where those newcomers held on to their faith and helped one another.

The church also reflects the company town, a defining and often controversial institution of industrial America. Companies built housing, stores and even churches for their workers. That provided real services, and it also gave employers great power over their employees' lives. The fact that the coal company erected Thurber's Catholic church shows how closely work, home and worship were tied together in such places.

Thurber's decline mirrors a larger national shift as coal gave way to oil and company towns disappeared. The church's return in 1993 reflects the late-twentieth-century preservation movement, when communities worked to recover and honor places that industrial change had nearly erased.

🧭If you visit

Thurber sits along the highway west of Fort Worth, and today it is a near-ghost town where only a handful of structures survive from a once-bustling community. The best-known survivor is a tall brick smokestack visible from the road. St. Barbara's, returned to Thurber in 1993, is another of the landmarks that tie the place to its past.

Look for graveyard hill and the church at its base, and think of the miners and families of many nationalities who once worshiped here. The cemetery on the hill holds some of that community, and its names can show you how international the town once was.

Thurber is well worth a stop if you are driving across this part of Texas, and there is interpretive material about the area's mining and industrial history in the vicinity. You can also drive two miles north to Mingus, where the church spent six decades, to see both chapters of this building's unusual history.