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Mudgee’s two central churches are a key part of the local skyline, some of the most easily identified landmarks visible from the surrounding hills, and the source of the name of Mudgee’s main street.
The first Anglican Church was one of the town’s earliest brick constructions, funded by subscriptions from local parishioners and built in 1841, at a time when most Mudgee buildings were rough slab structures.
The original church stood closer to Church Street than the current building, and accommodated 200 people; the first priest was James Gunther, who became the first Archdeacon of Mudgee.
The growing congregation resolved in 1857 to erect a new building able to hold 400, with the intention of later adding a gallery to hold a further 250.
After 17 months of construction, the church was completed and the old church demolished in 1860.
Gunther contemplated building a third church in 1877, but a long drought kept the congregation from raising the necessary funds.
After his death in 1879, his successor, Hans T A Bentzen, instead beautified the existing
church by adding the tower, reshingling the roof and installing a bell and organ donated by clergyman’s war- den Robert H D White.
The earliest permanent Catholic Church was built by Father Calaghan McCarthy, parish priest of Hartley, who moved his parish centre to Mudgee from 1852 and resolved to replace the town’s slab and bark church building.
He built the kitchen and four rooms of the Catholic presbytery in 1851, making it the town’s oldest building still used for its original purpose, and in 1857 built a church, sanctuary and sacristy to take the place of the older slab- walled, bark-roofed church building.
A correspondent reporting on the church’s consecration in The Empire in 1860, described the building as “decidedly the handsomest and most conspicuous one in the town”.
On December 7, 1873, work began on the current church, built of sandstone blocks from Botobolar and incorporating the sacristy and sanctuary of Father McCarthy’s church. The church was officially opened on November 11, 1876, with the bell placed in the tower in 1903, the organ installed in 1907 and the copper spire added in 1911.
Church Street was also the address of Mudgee’s original Methodist church, which was replaced in the 1860s by the church building that became the modern Uniting Church, although the gable and roof of the earlier church survives behind the façade of Mudgee Bookcase.
The Primitive Methodist church, destroyed by fire, stood further along Church Street on the spot currently occupied by Mitre 10.
The Baptist Church, built in 1951 and almost entirely rebuilt in stages over the ensuing decades, stood almost directly opposite until its demolition in 2008 to make way for the Aldi supermarket, with the Baptists establishing a new building on Bruce Road.
Sources:
The Catholic Parish of Mudgee website at www.mudgee.catholic.org.au
150 years of Parish Life 1841 - 1991 at St John the Baptist Anglican Church, Mudgee NSW, compiled and edited by Cynthia Robinson (1991)
The Empire, Monday, March 12, 1860 (online at trove.nla.gov.au)
The Architects of Mudgee, a lecture by John Broadley, available in .pdf form at www.johnbroadleyheritage.com
Additional advice from Clair Goodsell and William Paine.