08/18/2026
I found this today....
HOLLY BEACH – About 18 miles south of Hackberry, right on the Gulf Coast, where there is no holly and very little good beach, was a summer resort that sprang up in the prosperous days after the Second World War known as Holly Beach. It was a shabby little village of some 250 wooden houses, built with no regard for beauty, standing on pilings, tilted and sagging, bending and leaning as the sand shifted and the wind blew. Horses, cows and fierce black hogs roamed the streets and trails that separated these little buildings; beer cans, pop bottles and old milk cartons littered the roadsides and filled the ditches; white shell dust hung as heavy in the air as smoke in the pool room, or when the rain fell, the soft brown mud was every where underfoot. On a Saturday evening in the summertime, Holly Beach was overrun with tourists who came from the numerous towns and cities within a hundred miles or more. They crowed into this area (a village of about one mile in length and a quarter of a mile wide) bathed in the muddy waters of the Gulf, danced at the “Bon-Ton Roule,” drank beer and munched on snow cones, and then moved out like an evacuating army the next afternoon. In the winter, there was probably not a more dreary place in all Louisiana. The visitors were gone, save for a few hunters, who usually did little more than spend the night, appear in the bars with their green boots and untidy clothes, and then silently steal away. Perhaps not more than a dozen families remained the year round.
It was because of the visitors that a church had been built at Holly Beach about 1945.
I have seen some pretty sorry church buildings in my travels on two continents, but I had to Holly Beach to see the worst. It is hard to believe that in a land like ours, where men of America have built Rockefeller Center and the St. Louis Cathedral, anything as shameful as this could exist. Part of it was a Quonset hut, 20 x 48 feet at the base bolted to a concrete foundation little above ground level, at one of the lowest spots, between the marsh and the sea. This proving wholly inadequate to accommodate the Sunday crowds, a flimsy frame structure, set on cement blocks, had been added to one end, giving the appearance of a huge locomotive stuck in the mud to the tops of its wheels, with its smoke stack knocked off. There was not the slightest resemblance of a church, and one would pass it by as a tool shed belonging to a construction crew. When I showed pictures of this fantastic house of worship to friends of mine far away, they had remarked in a subdued and pitying tone: “Hard to believe!” Mass at Holly Beach in February of 1955. In this miserable half metal shanty there was no glass in the windows on the south side, the salt spray from the ocean having reduced the iron frames to flakes of rust; the door was without latch or lock and slammed to and fro at the will of the wind. The sky was heavily overcast and the north wind blew in over the marshes and off the lake, playing a weird and mournful tune through the cracks and open joints of the corrugated sheet metal. A few brave souls defied the winter weather and came to Mass that morning. Ah, yes, in spite of all that we have said, there were good souls in Holly Beach! And as I turned to them during the Mass and told them that even in those bleak surroundings I was glad to be among them, I meant it, and to this day still do.
After the crowd of not more than twenty of the faithful had dispersed and gone to their homes, I proceeded to look around this forsaken place, to see furnishings and whatever else there might be. The altar was homemade, painted and worn out white, and so crude as to remind one of the ancient equipment seen in an abandoned railroad depot in an old New England town. Over it were stretched the tree (sic) required linen cloths, ill-fitting, badly worn and bearing the foot prints of possums that romped and mooched at leisure during the long quiet hours of the week. On the wooden tabernacle stood a battered statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, onto the head of which the wasps had stuck a mud nest the size of a grapefruit. The few vestments that could be found were old, badly soiled and worn beyond all hope of repair; some of them were hanging on the wall, others were crowded into the drawers of an old bureau so dilapidated as to be unfit for use in any decent home. Cobwebs, the traditional mark of the forsaken, and the dead victims of the spiders, filled the corners and cluttered the sills. There were no screens nor glass in the windows to keep out the flying insects; and indeed there was ample proof of birds roosting on the candle sticks. Even though the Blessed Sacrament was not kept in this unsightly place I could not help thinking to myself of the lament of old King David to the Prophet Nathan: “Dost thou not see that I dwell in a house of cedar, and the Ark of God is lodged within skins?”
During the summer months that followed, and attempt was made to improve conditions at Holly Beach. Money was scarce, and most of the visitors were just not interested. Let us face the facts; the generous souls were just all too few. There might be as many as 500 people assisting at Mass on a Sunday morning, crowed inside or milling around outside the old Quonset hut, and yet the sum total of the collection would seldom exceed $50.00 - ten cents apiece. The humorous and amusing side was not altogether wanting; for in those days one could find in the offering basket such things as Mexican coins, street-car tokens, aluminum medals of the saints, yes, and even an occasional hot water faucet washer. I had quite a collection of these museum pieces at one time. Most of the permanent residents, however, were interested, generous and very helpful, and with their cooperation new windows and frames were installed, the interior walls were lined with marine plywood, new vestments and altar linen were purchased, and a general cleanup executed.
To make a Quonset hut look like a church was difficult enough, but to make it serve like one was even more difficult. To start with, it was an ugly thing, and could be enlarged only by lengthening it beyond all proportions. Moreover, the slab on which this one had been set was badly cracked, and being just about sea level, water frequently entered and puddled under the pews. The summer crowds just had to be reminded that if this church existed, it was largely for them. It was of no avail to argue that they had to support their home parish. If they could, and did, maintain a summer residence, then the building and maintenance of a church in the vacation land is part of the expense.
Repeatedly, the suggestion was made that we appeal to Church Extension for help. This I could not accept; for there were wealthy people visiting Holly Beach regularly, and these just had to be made to understand that even though they were visitors they were not guests. They just had to pay for their accommodations. At a painfully slow rate results began to show, and the income increased. We repeated our promises, insisted that the church was their investment. We were saving our money, spending a minimum on maintenance, and still trying to come to a decision as to whether we would scrap this whole monstrosity and start a new one from the ground, when in June of 1957 tragedy struck and settled the question.
When you drive through a village of some 250 homes on a Wednesday afternoon, see the inhabitants fretfully packing their belongings into cars and trailers, battening down hatches and boarding up doors and windows, and then two days later come back to the scene of all this activity and find not so much as a part of a single house left, rightly do you conclude that something terrible has happened. That is what happened to Holly Beach on June 27, 1957, one of the most destructive hurricanes to strike these parts in a generation, bearing the picturesque name of “Audrey,” came up out of the Gulf, smashed this village to smithereens, and carried it away into the marshes, depositing it there in a heap of irretrievable ruins. The church - that ugly “Quonset 20” was torn from its foundations, rolled and flattened by the tidal wave like a discarded toy, and its contents scattered through the wilderness. Holly Beach was not only destroyed; Holly Beach was gone. Months later, in the winter of 1958, at the suggestion of, and with the help of one of the employees of the Sabine Wildlife Refuge, I went on foot and by boat deep into the heart of those vast marshes were the hurricane had deposited great masses of debris and there tried to find some of the furnishing of the lost church. There, at a distance of eight or ten miles from the former site of Holly Beach, mixed with weeds, smashed houses, road signs, home appliances of every size and brand, skeletons of cattle that had been swept to their death, abundant supplies of beer and whiskey (the summer’s supply), children’s toys, and almost anything that the mind could imagine, I found some of the pews, stations of the cross, pieces of plywood that I recognized as the interior walls, rotting away and sinking into the black earth. It was impossible to move anything out of there, so we left it to prospectors, adventurers and the discoverers of future generations to unearth it and wonder what unknown city had stood there. All this was providential. No longer now did we have to debate and decide what we would do with this provokingly unhandy, unbecoming and thoroughly embarrassing piece of construction. It was gone!
Most of those who had fled or survived the hurricane either vowed never again to return to the scene of that dreadful tragedy, or just remained bewildered and undecided. But men have the happy faculty of being able to forget, and the call of home, however humble and unadorned, is exceedingly strong in the human soul. So they dried their tears, lifted up their hearts and started back, many to the only place they had ever known. Only a few days after the devastation of the storm, when the waters of the Gulf had scarcely receded to their normal boundaries, people were back on this desolate beach probing the sands for property markers, searching for personal belongings or for whatever else might serve in the grim work of reconstruction. Tents and temporary shanties began to appear where the village once stood, power lines were gradually restored, temporary roads were constructed, and in spite of their firm resolution to turn their backs forever on this storm-plagued and hazardous Gulf Coast, families were returning to start life anew. As one man so rightly put it: “I am a man over forty; all that I have, or ever hope to have is down on ‘The Beach.’ I operate a small grocery store and service station, and cannot expect to do anything else at this age. I feel that men will soon forget their sorrows and return, and I want to be there when they arrive. It is not very likely that during the years remaining to me in this life a similar tragedy will recur.”
So the lights that went out in June began to twinkle again along the ridges and across the lake in desolate Cameron. Holly Beach was returning to life and within a matter of months the inhabitants and the vacationers were building on an average one house a day.
Among these buildings to spring up like mushrooms was the “Anchor Inn,” which, in spite of its pretty name, was a cheap combination bar and dance hall. It was a hideous looking fire trap, looking like a large shoe box with a few windows cut in the sides, perched high on creosoted pilings. But it had floor space and a roof. People were flocking there on weekends, and there was a need for Sunday Mass. Therefore, with the permission of the Bishop, I obtained the use of the Anchor Inn to serve as temporary church in the new Holly Beach during the summer of 1958. In the orchestra pit, where only a few hours before a Cajun Band had been pumping out the hottest rags, a portable altar was set up and the Lord God of heaven came once more to this wooden town on stilts, only a few hundred feet from the ever menacing Gulf of Mexico.
Later in the summer, work was begun on the construction of a new church. An effort was made to purchase a new site, more suitable and more favorable located than that of the former building. But prices for land on those sand dunes were prohibitive - seven and eight thousand dollars for an acre of that precarious ridge. So we purchased eight more small lots (100 x100 ft) from Mr. Austin Davis of Cameron, added then to what we had, and hoped that Holly Beach would never become a thriving city. With the financial help from the Diocese of Lafayette, to the amount of $15,000, a modest building was completed and Mass recited in this new church for the first time on September 21, 1958. However, it was only on July 26, 1959 that Bishop Schexnayder was able to and give it his blessing.
Some months after the reconstruction of Holly Beach, when the earth around the new church was graded and a modest fence built, when roads were built and life appeared quite normal again, I obtained through the kindness of Mr. John Mecom of Houston, the use of a helicopter to take some aerial photographs. It was a lovely sight on a summer morning to look down from an altitude of abut 1,000 feet and see this tiny village sandwiched in between the immense blue sea and the endless green marshes. And as we hovered in the sky with the mid-morning sun on our backs, watching the sea clawing at the sandy shore, I looked to the northwest, to where the first Holly Beach was sinking into oblivion in the bosom of those wild marshes, and asked myself this question: “How long will it be before the powers of the sea and the wind rise again, as they have done so often in the ages before the coming man to this country, and carry this new Holly Beach to a similar death in the wilderness?” Those who live along the Gulf Coast must ever keep this in mind.
