06:11 PM CST on Saturday, November 22, 2003

By Nancy Holland / 11 News

FAYETTEVILLE, Texas -- They are not the answer to a prayer. No one remembered them enough to pray for them. In fact some 19th century paintings that now proudly hang in St. John the Baptist Catholic Church in Fayetteville were almost lost and forgotten forever.

St. John the Baptist Church doesn’t look like a place of mystery, sitting as it does in a quiet little town of fewer then 300 people. When the new priest arrived, he wondered what life would be like in the small rural parish. He never expected to unravel a mystery.

The questions began when Father Jack Maddux, began cleaning out years of accumulated “stuff” in the rectory and found an unexpected painting behind a pile of old furniture. I

“I didn't know, have a clue what it was you know.” Father Maddux chuckles.

He didn’t know but his curiosity kept tickling his mind. Father Maddux actually has a college degree in art. He couldn’t get the painting of the Virgin Mary handing a rosary to St. Dominic out of his thoughts.

An old bus barn used to stand just up the hill from the rectory. School busses parked there for years. Lawn mowers were stored there. It didn’t have doors and the roof was holey, in the very secular sense of the word. It was so decrepit it’s been torn down now, but there, in a loft, a parishioner found three more aging paintings coated with filth and diesel residue.

“When I saw the painting of Saint John the Baptist baptizing Jesus, it was just as black as my shirt.” Says Father Maddux, pointing to his shirt.

The mystery was, were they just old decaying pieces of canvas or were they something exceptional? The search for the truth took a parishioner to Houston. He picked the people at Allart Framing Gallery at least in part because the business began with the letter “A”, making it near the top in the phonebook.

“It was serendipity.” Smiles Allarts' Rose Avera.

The reaction when people there saw the painting, even in a state of decay, was immediate.

Avera says their first thought was “This is very good, how good?”

Even beneath the mask of grime they believed from the beginning that they held quality in their hands, quality that could be brought back to life.

“The materials used in the beginning were so good that they could stand being less than well taken care of.” Avera says.

Answers emerged along with the works themselves. Artist Ignaz Berger appeared in reference books. A Moravian painter who worked in the mid 19th century, his name still didn’t anything to those who possessed his works.

But as the paintings reappeared under the gifted touch of art restorer Dr. Tony Loro, they began to understand. Dr. Loro called the paintings “museum quality”. As he lovingly restored the canvas, the people at Allart designed and built frames including one that weighs 600 pounds, took ten men to lift, and shows off the centerpiece, John the Baptist baptizing Jesus.

Eventually, there were six paintings recovered, and, in the process, parishioners had uncovered a history as rich as the hues of their artworks.

“They had nothing,” said Tom Pearson as he talked about the first people who came to Fayetteville, “but yet they brought these paintings with them or got them over here. The sacrifice they must have made to get them over here!”

As it turns out those early Czech and German settlers in Fayetteville wanted to make their first priest feel at home in Texas. They thought the paintings, brought in from Europe would do that.

“They were struggling to make a living and to build their homes and yet they did this.” Lorene Nitschke marvels.

Nitschke is one of the few parishioners who holds some memory of the paintings. It was vague and had almost left her completely until she saw them again. Now she recalls one of them hung in the old church when she was married there in 1958.

It was a decade later when a new church was built in the late 60's that the art was cast aside, and forgotten till now.

When Monica Michalec saw the paintings, now hung on a wall specially built to hold them she recalls, “It was breathtaking. That's all I can describe it. It totally takes your breath away to see them for the first time.”

For Bonnie Rhode, it was much the same. “To me when you walk in here it was just a total overtake of being filled with warmth. You just saw the pictures and it just took your breath away. It was just so inspiring. It's like walking on holy ground now.”

Father Jack Maddux is getting used to that reaction. It makes him smile to see people walk in and stare. “They'll be coming in kind of jibber jabbering you know, and they dip their finger in the holy water font and they come around that little corner and they say ‘ahhhh’, you know, and it's just like breathtaking when you see it.”

Hard to believe these paintings almost literally faded away.

“I feel like they're here for they came back for a purpose.” Says parishioner Therese Keilers. “I mean it's drawing so many people back to see them.”

Restored to their full glory, the 19th century paintings that now grace the small church in Fayetteville are, said one parishioner, like a little piece of paradise. They are all the better for almost being a piece of paradise lost.