“What can be the prospect of a young man in Canada, if he has not more than two hundred dollars?” asked the author of a letter that was widely published in Quebec newspapers in the summer of 1851.

“A whole life of hard labour and continued privation is his too certain lot. But, let that young man go directly to Illinois ….

“As the land he will take in Illinois is entirely prepared for the plow, he has no trees to cut or eradicate, no stones to move, no ditch to dig; his only work is to fence and break his land and sow it, and the very first year the value of the crop will be sufficient to pay for his farm. Holy Providence has prepared everything for the benefit of the happy farmers of Illinois.”

If that description of farming on the Illinois prairie sounds like “heaven on earth,” it was likely because the author was a French-Canadian Catholic priest who envisioned planting a colony of French-speaking immigrants in what is now Kankakee County.

The Rev. Charles Paschal Telesphore Chiniquy was a well-known figure in Quebec, where he had developed a reputation in the 1840s as an anti-alcohol crusader — his Society of Temperance claimed more than 200,000 members who had pledged total abstinence from alcohol.

In December 1850, the temperance crusader received a letter from James Van de Velde, the Bishop of Chicago, whose diocese covered much of northern Illinois. That letter would change Chiniquy’s life, and the history of Kankakee County.

The bishop asked the 41-year-old priest to “… make use of your great influence over your countrymen … by inducing them to come here in Illinois. We have already, in Bourbonnais, a fine colony of French Canadians. Come and help me make this comparatively small though thriving people grow with immigrants from the French-speaking countries of Europe and Americas until it covers the whole territory of Illinois with its pious sons and daughters.”

Father Chiniquy arrived in Bourbonnais Grove (as it was then called) in June 1851. There, he found a settlement of several hundred families drawn to Illinois from Quebec by the efforts of former fur trader Noel LeVasseur, who had settled there in 1832. After preaching at the settlement’s Maternity BVM church for three weeks, the priest returned to Canada and published letters extolling the advantages of Illinois.

By early November 1851, he was back in Illinois to seek a site for what he was certain would become a large colony.

“He persuaded six of the most respectable citizens of Bourbonnais to accompany him; they went by wagon in search of the best site for the center of his future colony,” wrote Lois Meier in her 1976 volume, “The Saga of St. Anne.”

Chiniquy found what he was seeking at “Beaver Mission,” a small settlement some 14 miles southeast of Bourbonnais Grove, where brothers Ambrose and Antoine had built log cabins the preceding year and begun farming.

“He named the site St. Anne,” noted Lois Meier. “By December, 1851, two hundred men, women, and children had joined him.”

Among that first group of settlers were a number of skilled craftsmen, who were put to work constructing 40 “small but neat” log cabins to house the immigrant families.

“While the men cut timber and helped each other build, the women prepared the common meals,” Meier continued. “They obtained flour and pork from Bourbonnais and Momence at a very low price. They killed prairie chickens, quail, ducks, wild geese, and deer.”

<strong>CHURCH AND SCHOOL</strong>

In January 1853, work was begun on an important addition to the colony, a church and school building. Meier quotes Chiniquy’s description of the building process: “Seventy-two men went into a neighboring forest to fell the great oaks, and on the 17th of April, only three months later, the fine two-story building nearly forty feet square was completed. It was surmounted by a nice steeple, thirty feet high in which we put a bell weighing 250 pounds.”

The first floor of the log building would be the priest’s living quarters, while the second floor served as a schoolhouse for the colony’s children on weekdays, and the community’s chapel on Sundays.

A steady stream of immigrants made it necessary to expand the limits of the first colony by establishing settlements at St. Mary (now Beaverville), 12 miles to the southeast, and L’Erable, 15 miles to the southwest.

Chiniquy wrote, “These settlements were soon filled, for that very spring [1854] more than one thousand new families came from Canada to join us.”

In addition to French-Canadians, the colony drew individual immigrants and families from France, and from the French-speaking portion of Belgium.

While the colony was growing, so was a conflict between Chiniquy and Anthony O’Regan, who had succeeded James Van de Velde as the Bishop of Chicago in late 1853. In addition to doctrinal matters, a major point of disagreement was ownership of the church property in the colony.

Under church law, the Bishop held all church property in trust for the people of the diocese; Chiniquy claimed the property belonged to the people of the St. Anne colony.

The dispute went on until Sept. 3, 1856, when Bishop O’Regan excommunicated Chiniquy, officially excluding the rebellious priest from participation in the sacraments and services of the church. The priest was strongly supported by many of the colony’s residents. A letter to the Bishop, signed by 500 colonists, stated they considered Chiniquy “a good and virtuous priests,” and that they had “unanimously decided to keep him among us as our pastor.”

<strong>A NEW CONGREGATION</strong>

In the spring of 1858, some 18 months after his excommunication, Charles Chiniquy announced that he was forming a new congregation, which he called the Christian Catholic Church. An estimated 80% of the colony’s French-Canadian population became members of the new church.

Lois Meier wrote, “The break was highly emotional. Many families were divided brother against brother, and there followed years of ill feeling among those with the same name but different religious convictions.”

Chiniquy and his congregation later allied themselves with the Chicago Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church. In succeeding years, the former priest (still called “Father” Chiniquy by his congregation) traveled and lectured extensively and wrote four widely read books.

He maintained his St. Anne pastorate until 1891, when he retired and returned to Canada. Charles Chiniquy died in Montreal on Jan. 16, 1899, at the age of 89, and is buried beneath a tall stone monument in that city’s Mount Royal Cemetery.

Local trivia Following Father Chiniquy’s formation of a new church in 1858, how long were St. Anne’s Roman Catholics without a resident priest and a place of worship? Answer: In early 1871, Father Michael Letellier was appointed pastor at St. Anne. Construction of the stone church building that still serves the congregation was begun in 1872, and completed the following year.

Following Father Chiniquy’s formation of a new church in 1858, how long were St. Anne’s Roman Catholics without a resident priest and a place of worship?

Answer: In early 1871, Father Michael Letellier was appointed pastor at St. Anne. Construction of the stone church building that still serves the congregation was begun in 1872, and completed the following year.