Meridian home also housed church
MERIDIAN — During a family reunion, relatives return to visit the old homestead.
But for the Betres family, who had its reunion the weekend of June 12-14, the old house on what is now Cypress Street in Meridian was also the birthplace of the St. Fidelis of Sigmaringen Parish.
Tootie Betres of Renfrew lived for a time in the home whose second floor had once served as the Meridian Catholic Mission.
“I had lived there starting in 1958, but my husband (Daniel) and his family were there all his life,” said Betres.
During the reunion, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Kelly and Freda Betres traveled by bus from Pittsburgh to visit grave sites and offer prayers and tour the house, she said.
“411 Cypress St. used to be Center Street. They changed all the street names about 10 years ago,” she said.
Whatever the street name, the building had already served several purposes by the time Masses began being celebrated in it in the 1930s.
Owner Emiline Robinson sold the building to the Butler School District in 1912 for use as the Meridian School.
The district sold the property to Kelly Beltres, Daniel's father, and the Thomas family in 1930. Three years later, Kelly Beltres bought out the Thomases and renovated the downstairs as a family home.
“There's three stories, but the third story was never used,” said Tootie Betres. “This was on the second floor. Kelly Betres, my husband's father, rented all that space out to the Diocese of Pittsburgh and the Capuchins of St. Fidelis, which was located in Herman, which is where the mission priests came from.”
Betres said at least 53 Catholic families in Meridian and the nearby region had expressed desire to start a congregation.
Kelly Betres agreed to rent the second floor of his home to what became known as the Meridian Catholic Mission for $185 a year after removing partitions to enlarge the floor space.
She said the first Mass was celebrated on the second floor on Feb. 25, 1934.Betres said the Rev. Didacus Garovi from St. Fidelis Seminary and College in Herman served as the first pastor. Two Masses, as well as religious instruction, were celebrated every Sunday with confessions heard on Saturday nights.All that time, the Catholic residents were saving and planning for a church building, and ground was broken in the fall of 1936 for what would become St. Conrad Mission Church on Meridian Road.The first Mass and dedication was celebrated at the new church building on Halloween 1937.Betres said that with the congregants gone, the second floor was converted to living space and “rented out to various friends and relatives until my husband's sister moved in and made it her family's home.”Betres herself lived in the house for four years starting in 1958.“There wasn't anything left, but I would hear that this is where the baptistery was, this is where the confessionals were,” Betres said.The Betres home was later sold to Barbara and Ralph Cross, then to Charlene Vicario. Its present owner is Bill Slagle.Slagle said, “I bought it in 1989 or '90. You can't tell that it was a church in the past.”The first building to house St. Conrad also changed hands.The parish moved to a church at 125 Buttercup Road, and the former church became the Meridian Road Seventh Day Adventist Church.In 1995, St. Conrad Parish in Meridian and St. Stanislaus Kostka Parish in Lyndora merged to form St. Fidelis of Sigmaringen Parish.The Rev. Jim Murphy, senior pastor at St. Fidelis, said, “We have some stuff from the old church. I can't say we have anything from the old house.”
