The Owensville St. Louis Church has recently discovered six remarkably preserved sets of stained glass windows that were hidden away in a crawlspace under the present-day church.
As part of the parish’s 150th anniversary celebration, the windows were unveiled during a parish brunch in the St. Louis School gymnasium Nov. 21. A collective gasp arose from the some 60 people assembled at the brunch when the windows were revealed.
Still showing signs of being slightly blackened and singed in small areas by a church fire in the 1910’s (there is no official record of the exact year), the stained-glass windows are believed to date back to the late nineteenth century.
“We think that they date back from the 1880’s,” said parish priest Jerry Hilland. “Our parish records indicate that stained-glass windows were put in the church during the 1890 renovation. We can confirm this by looking at photographs of the old church and then looking at these windows; the dimensions seem to be correct.”