St. Benedict's Church

Duane's take

Here's how the official marker tells it, and here's how I'm gonna tell it to you. There's a church standing in Cameron County that has earned its place on this earth twice over. The first St.

Benedict's went up in 1910, a full two years before the congregation even officially became a parish. Think about that. They built the house before they hung the sign.

Then, in 1923, fire took it. Just like that, gone. But a congregation that builds a church before it's even a parish is not the kind of congregation that stays down.

By 1925, a new brick structure was rising up to replace what the flames had taken. And the man guiding that effort was Father Yvo Tymen, of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, who had taken on the pastorship of St. Benedict's back in 1921.

Father Tymen, born in 1879 and living all the way to 1977, was not a man who got to sit still for long. He saw the new church through, and then, just when you'd think the hard work was done, 1933 brought a hurricane tearing through and damaging the school facilities. Father Tymen supervised the repairs, and he oversaw the construction of a rectory on top of all that.

By the time he finished his tenure as pastor in 1937, he had essentially built this place from the ground up, then rebuilt pieces of it after the storm. The marker stands in Cameron County, and the brick walls of St. Benedict's stand right beside it, quiet testimony to what fire and wind could not finish.

What the marker says

The original St. Benedict's Church was erected in 1910, two years before the congregation became parish, and was destroyed by fire in 1923. This brick structure was built to replace it in 1925, under the leadership of Father Yvo Tymen, O.M.I. (1879-1977), who served as pastor of St. Benedict's from 1921 to 1937. In addition to this church, he supervised the construction of a rectory and renovation of school facilities damaged by a 1933 hurricane.