For week 15 of the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge, we’re covering Solitude. Imagine how isolating it would feel to relocate to a town of 500 people after growing up in a town of nearly 40,000. That’s what happened to my great-grandmother’s uncle, Reverend Robert F. Dube, when he got in trouble with his religious superiors and was reassigned.
Robert Fabian Dube was the eldest son of his father Odilon’s second marriage to Lucie Senechal. He was born in St. Louise, Quebec, Canada on November 22, 1881, but the family moved to Fitchburg, Massachusetts when Robert was about eight years old. As was the case with most mill towns in New England, Fitchburg became home to a thriving French-Canadian immigrant community. The Catholic church was the hub of social and spiritual interaction for families like the Dubes. It’s not surprising that out of their ten children, one became a priest and another a nun.
Robert’s education to become a priest spanned several years and countries. He studied for two years at the college of the La Salette Fathers in Grenobie, France, and studied an additional two years in Tournal, Belgium. He studied philosophy for three years at Laval University in Quebec. Robert completed his education at the seminary of St. Bonaventure in Allegheny, New York, where he studied theology. In June of 1909, he was ordained in the cathedral in Buffalo, New York by Bishop Colton. An article about his first mass appeared in the June 9, 1909 edition of the Fitchburg Sentinel. It noted that the Rev. Fr. Dube would remain in Fitchburg for three weeks with his family, “at the end of which time he will leave for the diocese of Lead, South Dakota, to report to the bishop of that place for assignment to parish work.”
This didn’t jive with the information my grandfather had written about Reverend Robert Dube. Because religion was one of Grampy’s passions, he wrote about any priests or nuns in the family. He wrote that Reverend Dube volunteered to serve in the military chaplain corps during WWI, against the express wishes of his religious superiors. For this disobedience, he was banished to the Black Hills of South Dakota. I didn’t doubt this was the story Grampy was told and believed. He met his granduncle Robert a few times, visited his Dube relatives in Fitchburg on occasion, and likely saw them when he attended boarding school in Worcester because one of the head priests in the school was another Dube relative. I’m sure he heard the story of his Uncle Robert’s banishment from them, and as it’s a bit of a romantic story about standing strong in your moral convictions regardless of the consequences, it’s one that would have stuck in his head. Those dates didn’t add up though. WWI was years from happening when Reverend Dube was assigned to South Dakota in 1909.
I was working from the assumption that Reverend Dube was sent from Massachusetts to South Dakota as a punishment, when in reality he began his career in one part of South Dakota and was reassigned to another. While his initial post in South Dakota wasn’t a punishment, it appears that his later posting likely was. Whether it was for disobeying his superiors for joining the military chaplains or for something else, I can’t say.
Reverend Dube initially reported to Lead, South Dakota (now called Rapid City). At the time, it was the second largest city in South Dakota, with a population of 8,382 in 1910, and over 10,000 people by 1920. It was small compared to Fitchburg, but large by South Dakota’s standards. From there, he was sent to nearby Deadwood to lead their church. Deadwood was a former mining town, and if the name rings a bell, there’s a reason – there used to be an HBO show with the same name about the corrupt town in the 1880s. Reverend Dube was assigned to St. Ambrose, the oldest Catholic church in the Black Hills, which was founded in 1877.
The Lead Daily Call has an article about blessing a service flag at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in 1918. It mentions “Rev. Robert F. Dube, former Vicar General of the Diocese and now also of the army chaplains.” This confirms that he worked as an army chaplain, though it seems like it was a local assignment, and he wasn’t shipped overseas as I’d always pictured. I could maybe understand him being punished if he was shipped away and left his church without a priest. That definitely wasn’t the case. He was still working at St. Ambrose where he founded a Catholic school that same year. During the school’s first year, 91 students were enrolled.
His banishment occurred sometime between October of 1918 when he was last mentioned in the paper, and 1920 when he appeared on the census living in Fairfax, South Dakota.
Fairfax was literally in the middle of nowhere – over 250 miles from Lead -- and about the size of a postage stamp. It was a mere 0.3 square miles and in 1920 had a population of 500 people, a number which steadily decreased on each census. 100 years later in 2020, only 96 residents called Fairfax home. Dube was no monk, longing for a silence and solitude. He came from a family of ten children and spent most of his life up until that point in a busy, industrial town in the east. He travelled and studied around the world in bustling cities surrounded by plenty of people. He probably felt like his world was shrinking as he went from a city of nearly 40,000 people in Massachusetts, to less than 10,000 in Lead, to about 2,500 in Deadwood, to a piddling 500 in Fairfax. I don’t even know how many of those 500 people were Catholic or attended the tiny St. Anthony Church. It certainly appears he was sent there as punishment, but if he was being punished for disobeying orders and not for something else, banishing him to the sphincter of South Dakota seems unduly harsh. That’s the story our family was told, and the one my grandfather believed.
Reverend Dube spent the remainder of his long life in Fairfax. His widowed sister, Pamela, joined him in the 1940s, and kept house for him. After living alone for many years and being so far away from his family, I’m sure he appreciated her companionship. He was made a monsignor in Fairfax on December 8, 1954, and passed away a few years later in a hospital in Yankton, South Dakota on December 1, 1958.
My Grandfather on my Mother's side was Edward Bernard Kirwan, who had a farm in Fort Randall, Gregory County, South Dakota. He retired in about 1947 to Fairfax and died there in 1954. Father Dube said his funeral Mass in St. Anthony's church in Fairfax. I attended the funeral, and remember Fr. Dube in his homily saying in his homily that Ed Kirwan met him at the train station with a team and wagon and brought him to what was to be his rectory in Fairfax. Fr. Dube also said Masses in the small mission chapel in Fort Randall, where my Mother's family attended. "Fort Randall" is near the historic Fort Randall, an Army post founded in 1856 and aban…