St. Joseph's Catholic Church is a historic

Roman Catholic The Catholic Church (), also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.27 to 1.41 billion baptized Catholics worldwide as of 2025. It is among the world's oldest and largest international institut ...

church in

Topeka, Kansas Topeka ( ) is the capital city of the U.S. state of Kansas and the county seat of Shawnee County. It is along the Kansas River in the central part of Shawnee County, in northeastern Kansas, in the Central United States. As of the 2020 cen ...

, United States. It was established to serve the needs of the growing population of

Volga Germans The Volga Germans (, ; ) are ethnic Germans who settled and historically lived along the Volga River in the region of southeastern European Russia around Saratov and close to Ukraine nearer to the south. Recruited as immigrants to Russia in the ...

, ethnic

Germans from Russia The German minority population in Russia, Ukraine, and the Soviet Union stemmed from several sources and arrived in several waves. Since the second half of the 19th century, as a consequence of the Russification policies and compulsory militar ...

. The church was listed on the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government's official United States National Register of Historic Places listings, list of sites, buildings, structures, Hist ...

in 1971. It was deemed "an outstanding Kansas example of a large 19th century brick church building." It is a red brick church. Its NRHP nomination states: "Most impressive to one approaching the church are the two identical steeples towering over all the neighboring buildings and trees. These towers begin as squares and then are quite nicely transformed into octagons. This transformation is executed very gracefully by first cutting off the square corners at the clock level; the next logical step is an octagon roof with equal sides." With .

References

External links

Sacred Heart – St. Joseph Catholic Parish
Churches in Topeka, Kansas German-Russian culture in Kansas Churches on the National Register of Historic Places in Kansas Churches in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas Volga German diaspora National Register of Historic Places in Topeka, Kansas {{Kansas-NRHP-stub