After our walk at Matthiessen State Park on Friday, we went to the town of La Salle and found a mid-afternoon lunch at a sandwich shop called Obee’s. Good sandwiches and chili, too.

Rather than head home right away, we stopped to look at a few of La Salle’s sizable church buildings. None of them were open, but the afternoon light illuminated their exteriors nicely.

First stop: Queen of the Holy Rosary Memorial Shrine.

Once a parish church, these days Queen of the Holy Rosary is a Diocesan Shrine dedicated to Mary in memory of all U.S. veterans. Designed by Arthur F. Moratz of Bloomington, it dates only from the 1950s. A late work for him. I’ve run across Moratz before; he did the Normal Theater.

Not far away (nothing is too far away in La Salle) is St. Patrick’s, a much older church, completed in 1848 to serve the Irishmen working on the I&M Canal. One Patrick Joseph Mullaney did the design.

According to a plaque on the front, St. Patrick’s is the “oldest living parish church in Illinois.” With a resplendent interior, from the looks of these pictures.

Elsewhere in La Salle is a church building that had the look of being closed. Permanently closed, that is.

St. Joseph’s, according to a stone in the wall, dedicated in 1907.

More remarkably, the cornerstone lists the architect: Henry Schlacks, whose work I’ve seen before. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an architect mentioned on the exterior of a church, but he was a pretty big bug among church designers more than 100 years ago.

In any case, St. Joseph’s isn’t listed as an active parish by the local Catholic church, and there isn’t any evidence that any other denomination occupies the place.

On the other hand, St. Hyacinth looks active. Just not open when I happened by.

St. Patrick was originally for Irish immigrants, while St. Hyacinth was for Polish immigrants, a later wave to this part of Illinois. It was completed in 1892 to replace an earlier church that burned down, and was also designed by another prolific church architect, George P. Stauduhar.

I could see other steeples off in the distance, since La Salle is still a low-rise town, and steeples are often the tallest structures around. But the light was fading and the afternoon getting chillier, so we called it a day after Hyacinth.