... if you buy Nelligen's old St Joseph's Roman Catholic Church in Runnyford Road.
The first church building on this site was of wood and the total cost including altar and furnishings was about 200 in the old money. The official opening took place on Sunday 24 November 1872 with the Right Reverend The Vicar General (Sheehy) conducting the opening ceremony. The Very Reverend Dean White of Braidwood was in attendance; the incumbent priest, the Reverend J J Garvey, delivered the sermon.
In late 1894 a tender was let to Mr William Isley of Braidwood to construct a new brick church for the growing congregation. The clay for the bricks was donated by Mr Charles McCauley and was dug from the "Racecourse Paddock". The records show that a working bee of sixteen woodcutters was formed from the congregation to cut wood for the firing of the bricks. The wood was donated by Mr Stephen Richardson, the Nelligen butcher. Some of the woodcutters were: Pat Egan, Mick Byrne, Dave Roughley, and Ben, Jim, Pat, Bob and Vincent McCauley. The cornerstone was laid on 24 October 1895 and the new church was opened in 1896.
Socially the Church served its local Catholic congregation for more than three quarters of a century and, being of local significance, has been on the State Heritage Register since 1997. Aesthetically the building, designed in a late Victorian Gothic, has an unusually slender tower and spire, and the building has the potential to reveal information about the stature of the local Catholic church at the end of the 19th century and about the size of the local congregation at that time and the availability of skilled tradesmen.
The Church withstood the many bushfires that have swept the area over the past 90 years and still stands today. Restoration work on the Church was commenced in 1976. A 'damp course' was installed and the majority of the interior plasterwork removed, having been degraded by 'rising damp'. The Church authorities decided that no further services were to be held in Nelligen and restoration work was stopped. The last official service held in the Church was the funeral Mass for Horst Jagow in April 1976.
The building was sold sometime in the late 1990 and converted to an art gallery. It was sold again in 2006 for $475,000 but the new owners never used it, and it has now gone back on the market for $565,000.
Investing in real estate being something of a new religion, here's your chance to combine the old with the new!
