St. Michael the Archangel Church, Madison

[1] Bishop Simon Gabriel Bruté de Remur of the Vincennes, Indiana Diocese was determined to bring the faith to Madison permanently and serve to the ‘hidden’ Catholics of the town.

As a British officer, Shawe had fought Napoleon Bonaparte’s men at the Battle of Waterloo where he was wounded, then immigrated to the United States and was ordained the first Catholic priest in Indiana.

Mrs. Schmidlapp, a Catholic, moved to Madison from Cincinnati and attended Mass regularly while Fr.

Shawe's assistant pastors to travel throughout the country and even parts of Canada to solicit funds for the building of Madison's first Catholic Church, St. Michael the Archangel.

[2] With the building of the church taking place, Bruté visited Madison a few weeks before his death.

While Bruté was in Madison, he administered three distant sick calls to dying Catholics (he was a doctor as well).

Gold trimming, extravagant statues and a much larger structure made St. Mary's the largest church in the city, of any faith, at the time[1][3][4] In light of the new church being built downtown, Irish-Catholics living on the hill (North Madison) formed their own congregation adjacent to the John Steinberger farm, two years later.

[4] Along with ‘the fighting Irish,’ years of 1852 through 1856, Catholics all over the nation (including Madison) were abused and tormented by a political group of anti-Catholics called the Know-Nothings.

Reuben Wells, the famed train engineer designed a locomotive specifically for the M-I Railroad to make the trip up this incline, the steepest in the United States.

In 1992, the parishes of St. Mary's and St. Michael's became one community of faith, with one priest, Father John Meyer, and two church buildings.