St. Joseph's Church (Fall River, Massachusetts)
St. Joseph's Church is a historic church located at 1355 North Main Street in Fall River, Massachusetts. It was built in 1880 in the Gothic Revival style and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1983. It was designed by notable church architect Patrick C. Keely.
Fall River, Massachusetts
Fall River remains a predominantly Roman Catholic city and is the seat of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Fall River, located at St. Mary's Cathedral on Second Street, formed in the 1850s by Irish immigrants. Also on Columbia Street is located Santo Christo Parish known as the Mother Church of the Portuguese Parishes in the Fall River Diocese. The Church was Established in 1892 to serve the local Portuguese community that Immigrated predominately from the São Miguel Island of Azores. Other imposing Catholic churches include St. Anne's Church at the top of Kennedy Park, Good Shepherd Church (formerly Saint Patrick's) in the South End, and the former Notre Dame de Lourdes in the Flint neighborhood, which was destroyed in a spectacular blaze on May 10, 1982. At the time of the city's peak population in 1920, there were over two dozen Catholic parishes existing throughout the city, with each ethnic enclave having its own parish. In recent years, the diocese has merged several parishes in the city, closing some, and renaming the united congregations, bringing the total number of parishes in the diocese to fifteen as of 2013.