BY KRISTIN BEUSCHER
OF PASCACK PRESS
WESTWOOD, N.J.—Postmarked in mid-April during the early 1910s, a postcard from Westwood, N.J., to Winthrop, Maine, shows an image of the old St. Andrew’s Church.
“We return to sister’s at Westwood next Wednesday,” the author writes. “Her home is on the opposite corner from the church on the other side [of the postcard]…We are at present with my aunt and having a good time with the loved ones. Farmers are planting stuff everywhere. The weather is fair.”
Presumably the writer’s aunt lived in Ridgewood, based on the postmark.
The postcard, sold locally in Westwood, went to Winthrop, a city in southern Maine just west of Augusta. The 1910 U.S. Census shows that the recipient, Ella Norcross, and husband Millard were farmers. Each born in the 1840s, they were in their 60s when they received this postcard.
The building shown is the old St. Andrew’s Catholic Church, built in 1905 at the corner of Washington and Fourth avenues. It stood where the parking lot for the Westwood Municipal Building is today.
The first Catholic mass was held in Westwood 140 years ago. Before 1905, the Old Drill Hall—the present site of the American Legion on Washington Avenue—was used as a mission church. People would come from surrounding towns, on foot or by carriage, for mass in Westwood.
In the 1960s the church moved again, but not far—the present church was constructed on Washington Avenue across the street and a few blocks west of its predecessor, opening in 1964.