Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church (Sherrill)
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Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church is the Catholic parish for the Dubuque County, Iowa town of Sherrill. It is part of a cluster of rural parishes that share a pastor and other facilities.
The parish was founded in 1852 as St. William's. Prior to this, residents living in the Sherrill area needed to travel to Dubuque to attend mass. This was about 15 miles one way — a considerable distance at the time. In response to the need for a local church and to heavy German Catholic immigration to the rural districts surrounding Sherrill, Dubuque Bishop Mathias Loras established the parish.
By the 1860s the name of Saints Peter and Paul had been adopted, and in 1889 the original wooden church was replaced by a large, brick and stone Romanesque Revival structure, which remains in use today. During the 1970s, the church's original carved wood altars were removed and its 19th-century wood trim was painted over, in an effort to give the interior a more contemporary appearance. Recently parish members completed a renovation of the building that restored the wood trim and added decorative details suggestive of its past.
Inscriptions on the church's stained glass windows and on the older headstones in its adjoining cemetery are in German, reflecting the culture of the parish's founding members.
For well over 100 years the parish school was operated by the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration (FSPA) of La Crosse, Wisconsin, and many girls of the parish who felt a calling to religious life joined that order. The school is still operated on the premises of the parish by the Archdiocese of Dubuque, as a consolidation of the original school and the Catholic school which once served the nearby community of Balltown, Iowa.
