St. Iosaph’s Church
Fifty miles east of Royalton is the tiny village of Muddy, population 78, according to the 2000 U.S. census. The sign at the city limits rounds the number up to 100. Chicago speculators discovered coal near Robinson’s Ford on the Middle Fork of the Saline River, and sunk a mine there in 1903. The Big Muddy Coal Company eventually changed the name of the hamlet to “Muddy,” which stuck. The mine, however, didn’t last, leaving behind a massive concrete tipple on the local landscape.
St. Iosaph’s Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church was organized soon after the Muddy mine was sunk, probably by the same immigrants who later migrated to Royalton.
St. Ioasaph (the Muddy church modified the spelling) was a 17th century bishop of Belgorod whose name was — and still is — revered by the Orthodox faithful, especially those from the Ukraine.
Madeline Kertesz Pisani, now of St. Louis, grew up in Muddy and lived next to St. Iosaph’s Church on property owned by her grandmother. The church, she says, served a significant population of Orthodox Christians who worked in the Muddy mine until the Royalton and Ziegler mines opened. That coal, she says, was easier to get out of the ground, so many of the miners moved to Franklin County. Those who remained behind, however, were faithful to the church.
A priest from Royalton came over to perform services and sacraments — first weekly, then monthly, then occasionally. Eventually, the parish faded away. The plans used to construct St. Iosaph’s Church later served to build Holy Protection Church in Royalton; their footprints are nearly identical. St. Iosaph’s onion-dome cupola was destroyed by a tornado in the 1930s, but the one on Royalton’s roofline remembers for both. Pisani recalls as a child playing with St. Iosaph’s dome on the ground of her front yard after the storm blew through Muddy.
Aside from its cornerstone and threebarred cross on the steeple, St. Iosaph’s exterior could easily be mistaken for a primitive Baptist or Cumberland Presbyterian church.
But its soul is undeniably Orthodox. Though services are no longer conducted there, every Sept. 17, the Feast Day of St. Ioasaph, the church doors are open, and pilgrims from Royalton, St. Louis, Des Plaines, Knoxville, Tenn., and other towns near and far return to Muddy to bless the old church.
Today St. Iosaph’s, although structurally sound and intact, has seen better days. The church and grounds sit in the shadow of an AMEREN power substation off a gravel road on the outskirts of town. Pisani and her brother now own the church and the old rectory, and have taken pains to maintain and restore them. “We put a new roof on the church last year and we’re working on restoring the bell tower now,” she says. “We can’t stand to see it fall to nothing.”
Although the Orthodox Church in southern Illinois’ mining belt has declined significantly in the last 50 years, the church is on the rise again in urban communities. Father John Matusiak, rector of St. Joseph’s Church in Wheaton, reports that the Orthodox Church in America is strong, vital, and, since the fall of the USSR, has strengthened its ties with the church in Russia. While OCA enjoys a “sister church” relationship with the Moscow Patriarchate, says Father John, it in no way sees itself as “the U.S. branch of the Russian church.”
“Over the past 20 years OCA has planted nearly 300 new parishes in the U.S., including several in the Chicago area — Wheaton, Palos Hills, Hyde Park — as well as in Quincy and Bloomington.
“None of these churches,” Father John continues, “considers itself in any way Russian Orthodox, serving as they do people of all backgrounds and each having a substantial number of recent converts.”
New converts and parishes in northern Illinois would please Father John Kochurov, founder of the Russian Orthodox Greek Catholic Church in Illinois and martyr saint of Chicago and St. Petersburg. And while the decline of the church in rural and southern Illinois would distress him, he would look for signs of life and growth and hope. He understood that the shadow of the Motherland may fade in America, but the Orthodox Church has much deeper roots.
That tradition, and the faith it clings to, will never change.
William Furry is executive director of the Illinois State Historical Society and editor of Illinois Heritage magazine, where this article first appeared.
