Location: 2648 Front Street at the church in St. Helena
County: Pender
Original Date Cast: 2018
In recent years, on Sunday mornings, Mary Bakan, her sister Ann Mizerak (both nonagenarians), and Ann’s son David have gathered to listen to the liturgy from a portable compact disc player, as their parish of Saints Peter and Paul’s Russian Orthodox Church can no longer support a priest. They meet in the sanctuary of the brick church built in 1932 in the Byzantine style of Eastern churches, replete with a cupola and golden onion-shaped dome. The story of the church and the community of which it is part is compelling.
The story begins almost 900 years earlier in 1054 when the Russian Orthodox was one of several Eastern Orthodox churches to separate from the Roman Catholic Church. In 1905 Wilmington businessman Hugh MacRae set up six agricultural colonies in southeastern North Carolina, populating them with European immigrants. The colony at Saint Helena, initially stocked with Italians, did not prosper to start. Between 1923 and 1932 thirty families (among them the Debaylos, Mizeraks, Bakans, and Vdoviches) from the area today known as the Ukraine (formerly Galacia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then Poland, and now Russia) joined the colony, settling in three-room houses on ten-acre tracts, purchasing their holdings from MacRae for $240.
By 1932 the community was large enough to require the services of a priest and called John Boruch. Born in Ukraine in 1877, Boruch moved to the United States in 1897, serving as priest at the similarly named SS. Peter and Paul’s Russian Orthodox Church in Passaic, New Jersey, 1902-1932. Construction at St. Helena began in August 1932 with the building completed in 1933 on a tract donated by MacRae. Baroch’s daughter Olga assisted in designing the church at St. Helena. Baroch died in 1969 at age 92 and is buried at the church.
In the United States the oldest Russian Orthodox parish is one established in Alaska in 1794. By 1917, when the Russian Revolution led the parishes in the United States to become self-governing, there were 350 in America. In North Carolina today there are Russian Orthodox parishes in Durham and Fletcher. The church at St. Helena, like the others, also affiliates with the Greek Catholic Church to maintain its administrative separation from the Roman Catholic Church.
References:
National Register of Historic Places nomination (2017) completed by Ed Turberg Nestor Boruch, In Observance of 50th Anniversary of SS. Peter and Paul’s Russian Orthodox Church (1982)
W. Frank Ainsley and Edward F. Turberg, Field Trip Guide: A Grand Tour of Pender County (1988)
The History of Saint Helena (2005)
Mattie Bloodworth, History of Pender County, North Carolina (1947)