Sacred Heart Catholic Church - Wichita Falls, TX - Roman Catholic Churches on Waymarking.com

"The first Catholic congregation began gathering in 1884, and by 1891 had grown to at least twelve Catholic families who moved from building to building to meet. By then they were finding it increasingly difficult to find adequate space, and at the itinerant priest Fr. O'Riordan urgings, got together as a congregation and built a small frame building that was called St. Patrick's Church on Austin Street between Seventh and Eighth Streets.

It was then that Wichita Falls was designated as a mission parish, with a priest having to travel twenty miles by horse and buggy from Henrietta to say Mass. This arrangement continued until May of 1894 when the building was destroyed by a tornado.

Under the leadership of the current priest Fr. Blakeney, the parishioners added their own money and all the labor to build a new and even larger St. Patrick's on the same site. In 1906 land on Ninth Street was purchased and the St. Patrick's building was moved to the present site of the church.

Sometime between 1907 and 1910 the Catholic Church of Wichita Falls underwent another significant change: the name of the church was changed from St. Patrick's to Sacred Heart. The exact reason and time of the change is not available from past records, but the most prominent legend says that the name' change reflected a change in the ethnic shift of parishioners. When the Wichitans began congregating as Catholics they were mostly made up of Irish immigrants; by the second decade of the twentieth century, the families of the St. Patrick's were also strongly represented by German, Czech and Polish immigrants. The legend has that the German parishioners were the most vocal, wanting the church's name to be changed to reflect a German saint. The whole matter was allegedly given over to the Bishop, who solved the ethnic battle by giving a non-partisan name of Sacred Heart.

In 1915, after two years of fundraising efforts and more months of frustration over legal problems with a contractor, construction was begun on a new building for the church. The dedication of the new building took place on January 20, 1916, with the Bishop Lynch of Dallas in attendance with visiting clergy from all over the diocese."