St. Peter's Catholic Church

Dismayed that his son’s adoptive home had no Catholic church, Frenchman Achille Wibaux instructed Pierre to build one here, and the rancher contributed $2,000 for the construction of this wood-frame, vernacular Gothic Revival structure. It was built in 1895 by R. R. Cummings and Eugene Blias of Glendive, while the Wibaux congregation was then a mission of Miles City and Father Van der Broeck of Miles City superintended the church’s construction. In 1938, the church was enlarged and its exterior walls were covered with scoria, a lava rock common to the badlands of the area. Father Leahy, pastor of the church beginning in 1931, conceived the idea of a scoria facing, and volunteers from the congregation went rock-picking in wagons and pickup trucks. Father Leahy recorded that “patient men did a beautiful job of laying the rock up to and on the steeple.” The building served as Wibaux’s Catholic church until 1965, when a new church was built and this building was converted to a catechism school.

Wibaux, Montana · United States