Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Church, Detroit Michigan

Date added: December 05, 2024

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The Assumption Grotto Church Complex consists of a well-preserved nineteenth-century grotto structure and early twentieth-century church. The Grotto of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Lourdes is an early example of the many Catholic grotto structures built in Michigan and the United States in emulation of the famous grotto at Lourdes. Constructed in 1881-83 (with further refinements added over the next few years) at the instigation of the parish priest, Rev. Amandus Vandendriessche, who had visited Lourdes in 1876, the grotto is an early and innovative work of Detroit architect Peter Dederichs, Jr., the earliest known Michigan architect who specialized in the design of Catholic churches and institutional buildings. The late 1920s Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary is a distinguished example of Neo-Gothic Catholic church architecture in the Detroit area.

The Church of the Assumption traces its direct origin to the settlement in the area of a number of immigrants from the Neustadt, Germany area in the 1830-32 period, although the area also contained a small French Catholic community that existed prior to this time. The first church building was a log structure known as the "Chapel in the Woods" and later as the Chapel of the Assumption and St. Mary's in the Woods. Served in its earlier years by priests from Detroit's French and German Catholic churches, Assumption obtained its first resident priest, Rev. Amandus Vandendriessche, about the beginning of 1851. The parish built its first substantial church building in 1851-52, a new one in 1907-1908 when the former one burned, and the present one in 1928-29 to accommodate a congregation greatly swelled in the early twentieth century by the growth of the city. Father Vandendriessche had the grotto constructed in 1881-83.

The church is one of a large body of architecturally distinguished Neo-Gothic churches in the Detroit area built between 1890, when construction of Mason & Rice's Trinity Episcopal Church was begun, and 1958, when Rowland & Mason's Presbyterian Kirk-in-the-Hills, Bloomfield Hills, was completed. Among the most important Neo-Gothic Catholic church buildings are Cleveland architect Henry A. Walsh's Cathedral of the Most Blessed Sacrament, a twin-towered structure completed in 1915, and Ralph Adam Cram's St. Florian Church of 1925-28 in Hamtramck.

Assumption was designed by the Aloys Frank Herman, Jr., Architects, of Detroit. Aloys Frank Herman's name appears in the Detroit directory for the first time in the 1919 edition. His occupation was then given as draftsman, with no firm affiliation noted. By 1921 he is listed as a partner with Howard T. Simons in the architectural firm of Herman & Simons. Simons was previously a draftsman at Smith, Hinchman & Grylls, then an important and rapidly growing Detroit architectural firm. The 1927 directory lists Herman as an architect, with Simons a "designer" for him. In the 1929 directory, the firm is named for the first time "Aloys Frank Herman, Jr., Architects," with Simons a member. The Herman and Simons association apparently lasted through the 1940s, but directory entries by 1940 list the two architects separately, with no firm connection noted.

Assumption is the earliest thus far documented Herman and Simons church. The following additional buildings were designed by Herman and Simons:
St. Michael's Church, Toledo, Ohio, completed 1941.
St. Joseph's Church, Tiffin, Ohio, begun 1941.
Recreation Center, Nativity of Our Lord Church, Detroit, c. 1940.
St. David's Church and Rectory, Detroit, 1948-49.
St. Augustine Church, Detroit, 1949.
St. Gregory the Great Church, Detroit, 1950-51 (built over 1928-29 foundations by another firm).

The concept of grottoes as places of divine habitation, places for prayer and meditation and for receiving visions, dates back to classical antiquity. It was invested with a Christian character early in the history of the Christian faith. From at least Roman times, man has not been content with utilizing grottoes produced by natural forces, but has also built his own. The period from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries saw the fullest development of what Naomi Miller in Heavenly Caves calls the "garden grotto." Grotto-building in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe and America seems to represent a continuation of this ongoing grotto-building tradition.

The Grotto of the Blessed Virgin Mary was built at Father Vandendriessche's instigation in 1881-83 after a visit in 1876 to Europe that included visits to his native Belgium and to Lourdes. The shrine at Lourdes, France resulted from visions of the Virgin Mary which Bernadette Soubirous experienced in 1858. When church authorities proclaimed the visions to be authentic, the grotto that was the site of these visions became a great pilgrimage site for the faithful. Like the Lourdes shrine, Father Vandendriessche's grotto soon became a pilgrimage site, especially for those in need of a cure for some otherwise incurable malady. Cures were reported and crutches "left behind as a testimony to the power of prayer."

Visits to Lourdes inspired the construction of a great number of grotto shrines in both the Old and New Worlds in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Father Vandendriessche's grotto appears to be a very early example of such structures in Michigan and, perhaps, the United States. The grotto has an unusual, highly architectural form, more like a small chapel than a natural rock-form containing a cave, that is very different from the more typical cave-like grotto structures of the early twentieth century. This unusual design may reflect the lack of other structures in the area that might have served as models. A more typical early grotto structure in the Michigan area, if not actually in Michigan, is the Our Lady of Lourdes Grotto at Notre Dame University near South Bend, Indiana. This was built in 1896-98 at the instigation of Rev. Edward Sorin, chairman of the board of trustees, who had also visited Lourdes in 1876. Designed to "replicate the European shrine at one-seventh its scale," the grotto is constructed of boulders with an arched opening.

Michigan examples of grottoes inspired by Lourdes include one inside St. Mary's Church in Detroit that may date back to the church's construction in 1884-85 and structures in South Haven and Westphalia. A much-reduced version of Notre Dame's grotto stands at St. Basil Church in South Haven. Built evidently in the late 1930s or early 1940s, this fieldstone structure has a small arched opening and, above and to the right, a niche containing the Virgin. The structure was provided by a parishioner as an act of Thanksgiving for his recovery from a serious illness.

The grotto in the cemetery at Westphalia, Clinton County, is said to be "patterned after the one in Lourdes." It was built by the men of St. Mary's Parish in 1935-36. It is a broad-front, fieldstone structure with a rounded cave, the back covered over in earth. The cave contains a simple altar and a figure of the Virgin set on a ledge-like pedestal at the right-hand end of the cave.

The 1920s and 30s saw a plethora of Catholic grottoes and shrines with grotto-like structures constructed in the United States. Of the relatively small number of examples of this largely undocumented structure type that we have been able to identify, most fall within one of two general types. One includes manmade caves loosely patterned after the Lourdes grotto and devoted to the Virgin Mary such as the one at Notre Dame University. The other includes more elaborate complexes comprised of a combination of structural forms and presenting different subject matter. Other non-Michigan examples of the Lourdes type include two designed and built by The Gorham Company of silverware fame and illustrated in their 1925 catalog of "Ecclesiastical Productions." They are the Grotto of the Vincentian Institute at Albany, New York and the Grotto of the Church of Our Lady of Lourdes at Overbrook, Pennsylvania. A perhaps unique example in Rockford, Illinois is part of the St. Mary Church complex. Constructed in the 1920s, this larger structure has an interior cave entirely enclosed within a rectangular outer structure. The cavelike interior displays a highly irregular, stonelike finish. The structure was designed by Rockford architect Wybe J. van der Meer, a specialist in Catholic church and institutional work.

One of the best known examples of an early twentieth-century Catholic grotto is the Grotto of the Redemption in West Bend, Iowa. Constructed beginning in 1928 by Father Paul M. Dobberstein, the grotto is an elaborate complex containing a variety of structures built of rocks, shells and coral, and "thousands of precious and semi-precious stones, ores, fossils, and bits of petrified wood," in the words of the Iowa WPA guide. Another complex more modest than the West Bend one but similar to it in its use of unusual materials gathered from far and near is the Grotto of the Immaculate Conception at Carroll, Iowa. This was also built by Father Dobberstein.

Two other well-known Catholic outdoor devotional complexes also dating from the 1920s and 30s and exhibiting similar home-grown masonry construction using found materials are the c. 1921-31 Holy Ghost Park developed by Father Mathias Wernerus at Dickeyville, Wisconsin, and the Our Lady of Mount Carmel shrine at Rosebank, Staten Island, New York, built in 1937-39 by Sicilian immigrant Vito Russo.

Little scholarly study of grotto structures, especially nineteenth- and twentieth-century Catholic ones as opposed to the more secular European ones of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, has been done. Much work needs to be done yet to identify major examples of the form both in Michigan and the nation as a whole and to better understand why such structures were built, who designed and built them, and whether there were national origins or other characteristics that the members of parishes that built them held in common.

The Grotto of the Blessed Virgin Mary is also an early and innovative project of its architect, Peter Dederichs, the earliest known Michigan architect who specialized in Catholic church and institutional work. During an architectural career that lasted from about 1876 to 1918, Dederichs (1856-1924) designed a host of important Detroit and outstate Michigan Catholic churches and institutional buildings, including such landmarks as Sacred Heart, St. Mary's, Our Lady of Sorrows, and St. Charles Borromeo churches and the St. Bonaventure Church and Monastery in Detroit; SS. Peter and Paul Church, Ionia; St. Joseph's Church, Adrian; and St. Michael's Church, Monroe.

Site Description

The Assumption Grotto Church complex faces west-northwest on Gratiot Avenue in northeast Detroit. The church, rectory, convent, grotto, and cemetery, along with a utilitarian boiler house form the larger part of the parish complex. The complex also contains modern school and activity buildings that stand behind the convent. The Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a basilica-plan, Neo-Gothic, limestone structure built in 1928-29, stands at the center of the complex fronting on Gratiot Avenue with the red brick, 1917-18 rectory next door to the south-southwest and matching early 1920s convent to the north-northeast. The very modest boiler house stands beside the convent. Behind the church, located near the back of the parish cemetery, stands an impressive grotto structure built in 1881-83.

The Church of the Assumption displays a basilica plan with side aisles, a high clerestory, deep transepts, and a semi-octagonal, aisled apse at the back. There is no tower. The church's main roof, covering the nave, transepts, and apse, is clad in slate. Standing-seam metal roofing covers the aisle roofs. The gabled facade has as its central elements triple, pointed-arch entrances, at the head of a short flight of steps, and a trio of traceried, Gothic, stained glass windows, the central one both taller and more broad than the outer ones, above. Broad, flat-topped piers, each with paired, gabletted buttresses, flank the entrances and rise to the height of the gable parapet. A Latin cross stands atop the gable apex.

The side elevations extend six bays to the transepts. These bays are defined by massive gabletted buttresses which span the aisle and support the buttress piers that alternate with broad, pointed-arch windows enframing stained-glass windows with Gothic tracery in the clerestory. The transepts' gable ends are treated in a fashion similar to the front, with paired buttresses flanking the central wall space with its triple, Gothic, stained glass windows.

In the church interior, the nave has walls finished in light-colored blocks of stone of slightly varied hue laid in random ashlar fashion. The ceiling is the roof's underside, with its timber rafters and purlins exposed. Massive, kingpost timber trusses with arched bottom chords spring from brackets in the side walls between the windows on each side support the roof. Aisles flanking the nave are entered through low, segmental-arch-head openings between the piers. The nave has a central and side aisles separated by rows of stained wood pews. In the transepts are additional pews, rearranged in recent years on a diagonal facing the altar. An organ loft, with its paneled breastwork projected slightly outward from the wall plane on paired brackets, is located at the entrance end.

The sanctuary area is approached through a Carrara white marble railing of Gothic design. Side altars stand in alcoves in the rear walls of the transepts on either side of the main altar. On the Gospel (left) side of the sanctuary is an episcopal chair, reflecting the brief period (1965-1967) when the church's pastor was a bishop. On the Epistle (right) side of the sanctuary are side pews and chairs. A portable wooden altar, mandated by Vatican II, stands in place in front of the original, permanent, white marble altar and altarpiece. The altarpiece is a Gothic structure with a central tabernacle crowned by a cross-topped dome and flanked by eight marble statues enframed in niches. A pale blue velvet dossal curtain framed by a wooden reredos forms a backdrop.

The 1917-18 rectory stands to the church's immediate right or south-southwest. It is a two-story, rectangular-plan, hip-roof building with a flat roof, two-story, brick later addition at its right-hand or south-southwest end. The rectory's original section has a five-bay, symmetrical front with a central entry shielded by a gabled, brick-pier porch. In the front, the first story's square-head windows are capped by brickwork arches enframing panels each containing a cross motif.

The convent stands about 150 feet to the church's north-northeast. Built only a few years after the rectory, it is a two-story, hip-roof, red brick-wall structure similar in design and massing to that structure. Like the rectory, it has a slate roof and a symmetrical facade with a central front entrance. A modern, flat-roof, brick extension projects from the building's north-northeast side.

Directly adjacent to the church on the north-northeast side, between it and the convent, a narrow paved roadway passes through a modern gateway and runs from Gratiot Avenue at a right angle to a parking area behind the church. The irregularly shaped Assumption Grotto Cemetery extends back (east) from the parking area with its largest portion being a roughly rectangular tract about 500 feet long by 225 feet wide arranged on an east-west alignment. The front of the grounds is marked by a modern decorative wrought-iron fence containing a simple, square-head portal gateway. A modern chain-link fence provides security for the remaining perimeter, with a hedge ringing part of the grounds inside it. Large deciduous trees dot the grounds, which contain monuments dating from the early nineteenth century to the present.

The grotto from which "Assumption Grotto Church" receives this popular name stands near the back of the church's cemetery at the end of a lane built nearly on the cemetery's primary axis. The grotto is a rectangular-plan, west-facing structure consisting of a "cave" with side and rear walls and a vaulted roof. The sides and rear are built of rough-cut ashlar stonework with the blocks laid up in a deliberately irregular fashion in which some adjacent blocks project and some recede from the wall plane, the intent apparently being to give the wall surfaces a rustic look akin to natural rock formations. The structure's front is Renaissance Revival in style, with vermiculated stone blocks with deeply sunk joints forming a pedestal on each side from which the arch, constructed of similarly finished voussoirs, that caps the cave opening is sprung. A substantial keystone at the center supports a low pedestal from which rises an open, four-sided, cross-topped, cupola-like canopy with Corinthian columns at the angles. This contains a figure of Mary. The low pedestal caps of the piers flanking the cave opening each display a small figure of an angel.

The "cave" has a marble floor. Its side and rear walls are lined with stone blocks arranged in vertical rows. The blocks in the ceiling are carved with the names of the popes, and other blocks display quotations from the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary. A stone altar stands in the center of the rear wall. Set on a small pedestal projecting from the center of the rear wall above the altar is a figure of Mary. It is set within an arch of lilies. Directly above is a small oriel window containing a painting of a dove.

Weather and vandalism have necessitated a few changes to the grotto over the years. The original statue of Mary in the niche, repaired after vandalism, has been moved into the sanctuary of the nearby Assumption Church. The figure of Mary from the canopy atop the structure, having been repaired after long years of exposure to the elements, now occupies the niche in the cave. A new statue was installed beneath the canopy in 1977.