Sacred Heart Catholic Church By Kathleen Tatum

The town of Wadsworth, in the County of Matagorda was established and laid out in 1909, by the Colonial Land Company, consisting of A. A. Plottner and J. W. Stoddard, monied men from Dayton, Ohio, who organized the company in 1908.

One of the first families to move to Wadsworth in 1909, was John H. and Anna (Lodes) Ottis, practicing Catholics from Okarche, Oklahoma.

Finding it quite a task to take their ten children three miles from home to St. Francis Catholic Church, in the Polish Village to mass, they were very instrumental in building a new church in Wadsworth.

With the help of Rev. George Montreuil, who was pastor in 1910 and through the help of Bishop Nicholas A. Gallagher of Galveston, the Catholic Extension Society, as well as the Wadsworth Catholics, they obtained financing in 1912 to erect a frame two-story building, 75 foot long and 60 foot wide at Wadsworth, on the corner of First Street and Avenue H. The town of Wadsworth had a lumber yard, the Alamo Lumber Company, where it was very convenient to buy lumber to build the church. They named the new church and school building Sacred Heart and it was consecrated in November of 1913.

The lower floor of the Sacred Heart building consisted of one large room and was used for a school. The upper floor, in addition to the Chapel, consisted of several rooms. Some of the rooms were used as a dormitory for the Sisters that taught school. The school lasted only two years because of bad crop harvests. Much to their disappointment, the community could not afford to continue the school.

At first, church services were alternated every other Sunday with St. Francis. Later, they held services only once a month at St. Francis and three times a month at Sacred Heart. In 1995, Sacred Heart Catholic Church services are held every Sunday with the priests coming from Bay City.

When the highway department shelled the road from Bay City to Matagorda, they changed the thoroughfare through the town of Wadsworth, from the east side to the west side of the railroad tracts. In 1995 that road is Highway 60.

Father M. J. O'Regan, with the help of the Wadsworth Catholics, very carefully dismantled the Sacred Heart Church and School and rebuilt only the church at its present site, at the corner of Highway 60 and Avenue F, in 1924. Highway 60 was made into a concrete highway through Wadsworth in 1932.