Clarendon was established in 1878 as a Protestant community by Methodist minister Lewis Henry Carhart, but the construction of the Fort Worth-Denver railway in the Panhandle in 1887 and Clarendon’s selection as a division point on the line to Denver brought population growth that included many Irish and German Catholic immigrants. Priests traveled great distances around the Panhandle and periodically held Catholic services in public buildings or homes. In March 1892 Bishop Thomas Francis Brennan purchased a church site in Clarendon from R.E. Montgomery, and a one-story wooden frame church, completed in July 1892 and named St. Mary’s Catholic Church, served a wide area. In 1898 St. Mary’s Academy, a two-story Catholic school, was built there, and day and boarding students attended until it closed in 1911. As membership declined in the 1930s and 1940s because of depressed economic conditions, the sanctuary fell into disrepair, but Catholics of the region restored the building. As the first Catholic church in the Panhandle, it was designated in 1951 as the Shrine of Our Lady of the Panhandle.