Pioneer Profiles – December 2021/January 2022
On November 23, 1863, the newly ordained Father Francis Xavier Blanchet arrived in Jacksonville to take charge of the Catholic Church’s southernmost mission in Oregon. Fresh out of his Quebec seminary, he had been sent to the parish by his uncle, Francis Norbert Blanchet, Archbishop of “the Oregon Country.”
Following the 1852 discovery of gold in Southern Oregon and the influx of miners and settlers, priests from California and northern Oregon began visiting the mining camps and the little settlement of Jacksonville (Table Rock City) to administer the sacraments to the Catholic inhabitants. In 1852, Reverend James Croke celebrated the first Catholic mass in the home of a local resident. Three years later, he counted 105 Catholics in the Rogue Valley. With that number of potential parishioners, the archbishop asked Father Croke to establish a mission and evangelize Southern Oregon. Father Croke, later the Vicar of the San Francisco Archdiocese, was the priest who had St. Joseph’s constructed in 1858, Southern Oregon’s first and oldest standing Catholic church.
Father Blanchet described his initial impression when he arrived in Jacksonville five yeast later:
“The chapel was small, as was the assembly that came together for services. The southern Oregon mission is 200 miles in length by 150 wide…a vast diocese. You can see that the missionary must be a traveler, ordinarily covering one thousand miles in the space of a year, if he wants to visit his scattered sheep twice. Within a week, this missionary once traveled two hundred seventy-four miles to minister to two dying patients.”
To cover those many miles, Father Blanchet traveled on muleback or by carriage or stagecoach, often under trying conditions. His first winter in Jacksonville, a man dying of consumption (tuberculosis) who lived 70 miles north of town asked for a Catholic priest. Blanchet hired an open wagon and driver and made the trip in pouring rain, becoming thoroughly soaked on the journey. At a swollen stream, unfordable for the horse, Blanchet was left with a blanket while the driver went in search of mules who could make the crossing. When the driver returned, Blanchet’s blanket was frozen, but the crossing was made successfully in time for the priest to administer the sacraments.
As the years passed, Father Blanchet established other missions throughout Southern Oregon and eventually had 16 missions located in communities from Corvallis on the north to Crescent City on the south and from Coos Bay on the west to Lakeview on the east. For many years none of the missions except Jacksonville had resident pastors. They were served by Father Blanchet or his occasional assistant.
The need for religious teaching in Jacksonville was soon obvious to Father Blanchet, and early in 1865 he wrote to the Mother Superior of the order of The Holy Names of Jesus and Mary in Portland asking them to establish a school in Jacksonville. In response to this appeal, four nuns were assigned to the convent. With financial support from both Catholic and Protestant citizens, Father Blanchet acquired the property at the northeast corner of Fifth and D streets for the school, to be known as St. Mary’s Academy. During the first scholastic year the register showed an entry of twelve resident students and thirty-three day-students.
Then, in December of 1868, the dreaded smallpox made its appearance in Southern Oregon where the epidemic wrought its greatest havoc in Jacksonville. The plague broke out in the poorer section of the community. At first, doctors thought it was chicken pox. By the time the mistake was discovered, the disease had spread throughout town. Within six weeks there were 75 cases. (A description of the impact of this and other epidemics is in the November 2021 Pioneer Profiles published online-only at https://jacksonvillereview.com/pioneer-profiles/.)
A local newspaperman wrote, “Terror seized the townsmen, and there were few who dared nurse the sick and bury the dead.” Outstanding exceptions to this were Father Blanchet and the Sisters at the convent school. With the school closed and the students sent home, the Sisters nursed the sick for the next eight weeks while Father Blanchet administered the sacraments and helped bury the epidemic’s victims. Their efforts were subsequently acknowledged even by those who had not been particularly supportive of the Catholics with the local newspapers printing eulogies about the heroism of Father Blanchet and the nuns.
When a scarlet fever epidemic followed on the heels of smallpox, the Sisters were relieved of their duties. But Father Blanchet felt the town needed the school, and in July of 1869, he traveled to Portland to obtain the services of four more Sisters. When they arrived in August, St. Mary’s Academy was reopened. Given its success, a year later the church purchased the James Drum house on California Street and the school was moved there. (The school was moved to Medford in 1908 and the property is now the site of Beekman Square.)
Then in April 1873, while Father Blanchet was traveling his parish, a fire originated in the wood frame U.S. Hotel building destroying everything on the north side of California Street between 3rd and 4th streets. The flames were encroaching on St. Josephs when a change in the wind saved the church.
Three months after the conflagration and ten years of work on behalf of the church, the tired priest was granted several months leave. He returned to his native Montreal, and while in Canada he wrote his book, Dix ans sur Za Cote du Pacificque (Ten Years on the Pacific Coast). The French-speaking people of his native province were his intended audience although he asked for the indulgence of his readers “because he had been speaking only English for ten years and his French was rusty.”
When Father Blanchet resumed his duties in Jacksonville, he took an active interest in town activities. He served as a volunteer fireman. He maintained a loan library in the church. Although occasionally criticized in the press for his stand on Protestant secret societies, he was popular, respected by the townsfolk, and welcomed in almost every home regardless of creed.
In 1875 he purchased a private residence at the opposite end of the block from the church. That became the Catholic Rectory and Blanchet’s home from then on.
Apparently, the field bordering his residence was a popular site for local boys to play baseball. One recalled that “when it got a little late of an evening, Father Blanchet would steal out his back door, slip into the nearby woods, and war whoop like a Rogue River Indian.” That spelled curfew for the children, and they would scamper home to their mothers for protection.
Father Blanchet remained in his Southern Oregon parish until 1888 when he was named pastor of the church in St. Paul, Oregon, a mission his uncle the archbishop had established and where his uncle was buried. Father Blanchet subsequently served as pastor at the St. Gervais mission, was appointed Chaplain at Portland’s St. Vincent’s Hospital, and later given the position of Vicar General. In 1903 he was named a Roman Prelate in recognition of his priestly zeal and devoted service to the Church.
While still serving as hospital chaplain, Monsignor Blanchet died on May 22, 1906. He was buried in the St. Paul cemetery next to his uncle. Father Francis Xavier Blanchet is remembered in the Chronicles of St. Vincent’s Hospital as follows:
“Monsignor had a heart of gold. All who came under his spiritual care were his children and he was their father. He had a kind word for all, young or old. Always willing, he knew how to draw everyone to him, and no one departed from him without carrying away a consoling word or a spiritual thought which never failed to bear fruit.”
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