File:St. Francis of Assisi Chapel and Columbarium, Tonawanda, New York - 20230225.jpg

English: Seen on a February 2023 evening is the chapel, columbarium, and former sanctuary of St. Francis of Assisi Church, located at 73 Adam Street in the city of Tonawanda, New York. This charming structure of locally quarried limestone was designed by Constantine Schimminger, a Bavarian-born stonemason who also functioned as a parish trustee and who enlisted the volunteer efforts of parishioners to aid in its construction. The Italianate style - typical enough of mid-19th century architecture in general but not commonly used in the design of churches - is exemplified here by the windows, tall and narrow and topped by round arches, and in the eaves of the roof which are accentuated by ornamental wooden brackets. Note also the unusual raking corbel work flanking the central tower, whose spire, once tall and spindly, was later truncated to what looks like a miniature mansard roof. The earliest of what would ultimately be six Roman Catholic parishes serving the twin cities of Tonawanda and North Tonawanda, St. Francis of Assisi traces its history back to August 1849, when Buffalo bishop John Timon dispatched the Rev. Sergius Schoulepnikoff to minister to the citizens of what was that a rapidly growing lumbering port at the mouth of Tonawanda Creek, near the west end of the Erie Canal. Though the Rev. Schoulepnikoff was Russian-born, the local Catholic community at the time was mostly of German and Alsatian heritage; accordingly, by 1853 - the year after the parish was formally founded - he had been succeeded in his post by the Rev. Francis Uhrich, the first in a nearly unbroken string of German-speaking pastors who would preach at St. Francis for the following half-century plus. The original wood-frame chapel on Franklin Street was superseded in 1862 by the building seen here, which served the congregation for nearly a century thereafter. By the 1890s, St. Francis had grown exponentially and boasted a parochial school and a convent (the former still operational; the latter closed in 1990), a growth that caused increasingly crowded conditions that were further exacerbated by the post-World War II move of the middle classes out of inner cities which turned Tonawanda, once more or less an independent entity, increasingly into a satellite suburb of nearby Buffalo. By March 1954, when plans were unveiled for the construction of the present-day sanctuary on Broad Street, the parish's population had ballooned to a tally of 4,000. After the dedication of the new building, the 1862 church was reused variously as a gymnasium for the parochial school and for storage until its renovation and rededication in 1993 for a novel purpose: namely as a columbarium, where wall niches hold the cremated remains of former parishioners and other local Catholics. It also serves as the church's chapel, playing host to a limited schedule of baptisms, weddings, funeral services, and other special-event Masses as the need arises.