Old Saint Peter's Landmark

Old Saint Peter's, a small Gothic Revival Catholic church that has stood on a basalt bluff above the Columbia River since eighteen ninety-eight, is one of the oldest surviving churches in the Gorge. It served the Catholic farming and ranching families who homesteaded the benchlands east of The Dalles in the late nineteenth century. The congregation eventually outgrew the building, and by the nineteen sixties it sat empty and deteriorating.

Local preservationists rallied in the early nineteen seventies, and citizens saved the building from demolition in nineteen seventy-one, and it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-four. It was restored and re-dedicated as a non-denominational landmark. The building now serves as a museum and rents for weddings and other events.

Its white clapboard exterior against the ochre cliffs of the Gorge makes it one of the more photographed small structures in eastern Oregon.