Church planned at site of state's first Catholic church Xerxes Wilson, The News Journal 9:42 a.m. EST January 12, 2015 Some 225 years after a log cabin church was built at the Coffee Run Mission just south of Hockessin, the property will again host a house of worship. Trinity Community Church will soon submit preliminary plans to New Castle County's land use department to build a church on the property located at 6580 Lancaster Pike. The 16.5 acre tract was once was home to Delaware's first Catholic church and more recently has been a source of tension for neighbors who opposed plans for a school on the property. "We feel that years ago, God made this a church. That is what he wanted and it is going to be that again," said Trinity's Pastor Steve Trader. The Hockessin native left his job at AstraZeneca in 2005 to start the interdenominational Christian church that holds its roots in the Assemblies of God. Since, the church has grown to some 350 members in a time when many other congregations are dwindling.
"We felt a need in the community for a church that could blend denominations," Trader said. The church plans to build a 20,000 square feet worship center to seat 500, with offices, student ministries space, a children's area and coffee house. Trinity Church plans to build a 20,000 square feet church at the top of the hill at Coffee Run. The site was the location of the first Catholic Church in Delaware.(Photo: TRINITY COMMUNITY CHURCH) Plans are preliminary and subject to approvals from various facets of government. Trinity currently gathers at the Wilmington Christian School on Loveville Road for Sunday services. The church's ministry initiatives and offices are now housed on the second floor of the red-roofed cabin known as The Well on Lancaster Pike. Below, visitors sip coffee and order food sold to raise money for the church's support missions. Trader said the church hopes to maintain its current presence at The Well after the new church is built, and if all goes to plan, construction of the new church will begin this year. "I think Odyssey had a proposal of 225,000 square feet. This is under 20,000, so this is much more reasonable," said Leslie Wagner, president of the Westgate Farms Civic Association, whose residents are the property's neighbor.
Odyssey Charter School sold the property to Trinity last year after the school withdrew its plans to build a kindergarten through 12th grade school on the plot. The school has since turned its attention to Barley Mill Plaza for its new school. Residents of Westgate joined with other neighbors bent on stopping the school's Coffee Run plans over concerns around the development's effect on drainage and traffic as well as the school buildings' proximity to residents' backyards. Preliminary plans for the church call for vehicles entering the property from Lancaster Pike. "It should create less of a traffic impact. It may create an impact on Sundays, but I don't see that as an issue," said Francis Swift, president of the Greater Hockessin Area Development Association, an umbrella organization for local civic groups. "You don't have a lot of heavy traffic there on weekends." The first church on the property would have only seen horse and carriage traffic. In 1772, the property became the first permanent Catholic base in the area when it was purchased at the order of Father John Lewis, a Jesuit missionary familiar with the area from his mission travels. The first log chapel on the site was built 12 years later beside a hilltop cemetery that remains there today. For a time, the church was the only Catholic church within some 100 miles, according to Joe Lake, president of the Hockessin Historical Society.
The original church at Coffee Run is depicted beside the cemetery that still sits on the property.(photo: TRINITY COMMUNITY CHURCH) "People couldn't go to church here every Sunday," Lake said. "From Wilmington, they would have to walk to Coffee Run. From Philadelphia, they would have to walk to Coffee Run... It was a pilgrimage." The original log church was rebuilt at least once over the next century with the land around it serving as a farm, Lake said. The property was taken under the stewardship of Father Patrick Kenny in 1808 when he moved into a stone farmhouse on the property. It was under his leadership that other churches in northern New Castle County were founded. The church at Coffee Run remained in use until the late 1800s when other local Catholic churches had come to prominence, Lake said. The property, known to locals as Mundy Farm, was purchased by the Mundy Family in 1912. The family maintained the property as a dairy farm until the 1960s. The site was maintained as a cattle farm until at least the '90s by Bill Mundy. Lake said the Mundy family had a reverence for the property's history that lacked in the subsequent property managers. "These developers will buy a historic property and take it into benign neglect. They don't do anything. They will pray it falls down or burns down because they know the historic status is there and they have to get by that," Lake said.
The stone buildings that stood as relics of the early mission were torched in two separate cases of arson in the past five years. Buy Photo Two boys were arrested in the arson fire that heavily damaged the historic Coffee Run Mission parsonage near Hockessin, later the building was demolished illegally.(photo: ROBIN BROWN/THE NEWS JOURNAL) Kenny's three story farmhouse was burned by two Hockessin teenagers discarding a smoldering torch in 2010. The two were later charged with arson. New Castle County fined development firm Harvey, Hanna & Associates, which managed and intended to develop the property, for demolishing the building's remains without proper approval following the fire. In 2011, two other Hockessin teens were charged with arson after a fire that torched the last remaining building on the property, a stone milking barn, part of which dates to the early years of Kenny's time on the property. Today, charred patches of the barn's roof are still held up by its sturdy stone walls and old timbers tagged with graffiti. Trader said the church plans to save the historic stone portion of the barn structure and stone fence enclosure on the barn's southern side. "We want to restore and preserve the original part. It could be neat chapel," Trader said. "There could be local events and you will be able see the whole milking barn part of the history here."
The property still hosts a cemetery where Kenny and dozens others from his time are buried. At least 30 people rest outside the existing cemetery fence, which was added decades after the cemetery was in use. Lake said Irish immigrants killed in nearby powder mill explosions in the 1800s are also buried on the property. The cemetery is still owned by the Diocese of Wilmington and according to one local priest there is no resentment that an interdenominational church will sit on land steeped in Catholic history. "Pastor Trader and his community have worked hard with us to make sure our cemetery is preserved and protected. That is the first thing he wanted us to know," said the Rev. Charles Dillingham, who is pastor of St. Mary of the Assumption Parish in up the pike in Hockessin. Dillingham's church is seen as the contemporary successor of the original Coffee Run church. Parishioners of St. Mary of the Assumption joined with members of Trinity last year to bless the property, Dillingham said. "The very fact that he had a Catholic priest with them to bless the property, we used the Catholic holy water, that shows you that they are respectful of that tradition," Dillingham said. "We really believe what they are going to do is going to further the initial purpose of that property which is a house of worship." Contact Staff Writer Xerxes Wilson at (302) 324-2787 or xwilson@delawareonline.com. Follow @Ber_Xerxes on Twitter.
Buy Photo A historic marker sign sits outside the Coffee Run Cemetery. The Trinity Community Church purchased the property and will soon file preliminary plans to build.(photo: KYLE GRANTHAM/THE NEWS JOURNAL)