The album of Dunkard Township churches on file at Cornerstone Genealogical Society has only this small photograph to show for St. Nicolas Greek Catholic Church in Newtown. Today you can find it across the street from Budapest Road, minus its steeple and cross, resided and repurposed. Very few parishioners are left to remember attending services there, but Juliann Wozniak, who went there as a kid, told me some of the back story that is part of her family history.
Maternal grandfather John Rohulick, who came to Bobtown from Eastern Europe and quit the mines to build a store, invited other ethnic Catholics to hold services in an upstairs room.
It wouldn’t be long before parishioners built St. Nicolas, with dozens of families in the congregation. Juliann remembers services and picnic lunches Mt. St. Macrina (near Uniontown) on Labor Day weekend to be with Byzantine Catholics from all over the country and beyond. Plus, Juliann added with a grin, it was a chance to eat real old school food like halupki and halushki. (Translation: Stuffed cabbage rolls and fried cabbage and noodles.)
St. Nicolas was a satellite of St. Mary Byzantine Catholic Church in Morgantown, WV and shared a priest. Due to dwindling attendance the church was de-consecrated in 1980 and Juliann thinks the Icons were taken to Mt. St. Macrina. Then the Eparchy – Greek for Diesis – put the building on the market.
But Juliann hasn’t lost touch with her ancestral faith – she can still speak Church Slavonic, the medieval proto-Slavic language used in the chants and hymns of her childhood and she streams Divine Liturgy services online.
Plus, she knows how to make halushki the way her mother Julia and aunt Olga did.
“It’s easy. You boil cabbage and noodles then fry them. Even I can do it!”