Saint Francis Xavier Mission (De Pere, Wisconsin)
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/af/The_Red_Pieta%2C_by_Lester_W._Bentley%2C_1942.jpg/220px-The_Red_Pieta%2C_by_Lester_W._Bentley%2C_1942.jpg)
The mission of St. Francis Xavier was a seventeenth-century Jesuit mission located on the rapids of the Fox River near De Pere, Wisconsin.[1]
It was founded in 1671 by Claude Allouez to proselytize the native peoples of the western Great Lakes. In 1684 a chapel measuring 70'x40' and seating six-hundred was completed under the direction of Father Verboort to serve an expanding Catholic population.[2] The mission was used as a base of operations by Nicolas Perrot in his explorations of the Upper Midwest in the 1680s. In 1686 he made a present of a silver ostensorium to the mission which was rediscovered by workmen digging a foundation in 1802. In 1687 the mission of St. Francis Xavier was destroyed in an Iroquois attack.
References
[edit]- Campbell, Henry Colin. Wisconsin In Three Centuries. 1st. New York: The Century History Company, 1906. Print.
44°26′56″N 88°03′42″W / 44.44889°N 88.06167°W