February 8, 1980 – St. Mary’s Catholic Church & Rectory – located at 220 E. Jefferson Street – is designated on the National Register of Historic Places.
The first Mass in Iowa City was celebrated by a frontier missionary, the Rev. Samuel Charles Mazzuchelli on December 20, 1840. It was attended by 28 people in a building that doubled as a private home and a hotel owned by Ferdinand Haberstroh. St. Mary’s parish was established by Mazzuchelli in 1841, named St. Mary of the Assumption, and a small building was largely completed by 1842. The current 1869 church was built around the existing one, which then was demolished from the inside and carried out piece by piece. The beautiful 140-foot steeple on the new facility was added in 1874.
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