MBARGER - On a fall day 62 years ago, nine Italian men, POWs captured in North Africa, began painting drab St. Mary's Catholic Church into color. Six weeks later, the church reflected the Renaissance roots of its artists.
How St. Mary's was transformed from plain to beautiful draws on the story of World War II that came right to the parish doorsteps in the early 1940s, part of the impact of Italian prisoners of war interned between 1943 and 1946 and their effect on the community.
St. Mary's Church was built between 1929 and 1930 in the town settled by German and Swiss immigrants. About the same time the late Rev. John Krukkert was assigned to St. Mary's Church in 1944, the U.S. government built the 800-acre Hereford Military Reservation and Reception Center.
The POW camp, one of two in the Panhandle - the other was McLean Permanent Alien Internment Camp for German prisoners - held some 4,000 men, many of whom were artists and craftsmen.
Locals discovered talent among the POWs. Among their skills were their ability to make musical instruments and furniture, said Elsie Batenhorst, Umbarger native and church tour guide.
Krukkert at some point asked the camp commander if any prisoners could help beautify the church. He agreed.
The group was led by Franco Di Bello, an English-speaking Italian officer.
By the time the volunteers finished, two murals - "The Annunciation" and "The Visitation" - adorned both sides of the altar. An oil-on-canvas depiction, "Assumption of Mary," was painted behind it.
A wood carver created a bas-relief scene of The Last Supper, which fronts the white marble altar.
On both sides of the "Assumption of Mary" painting, more vertical bas-relief carvings feature grapes, olives and crosses. Christian symbols - including crosses, anchors, olives, grapes and lions - ring the walls.
Krukkert earlier ordered stained-glass windows in jewel colors from his native Holland, and POWs installed them.
POWs left other marks.
Charles Schlabs was a boy when the camp was built. He recalled shortages and rationing, and days when prisoners worked the fields for 10 cents an hour.
Schlabs, now 77, grows cotton and sorghum on camp land he owns with only concrete remains of buildings, a water tower and a swimming pool as evidence of its former use. A 13-by-13-foot plaster-over-brick chapel, now vandalized, memorializes five POWs who died in the camp.
"It was like a city, you might say," Schlabs said.
Temple Hill, 83, and Rachel Henslee, 84, worked in the camp as civilians. Hill, who worked in the personnel office, owns a POW-painted portrait of herself.
"They were all high-class people," she said.
Henslee, who worked in the post engineer's office as a secretary, recalled hearing POWs singing opera while marching and producing a Christmas pageant. POWs worked with her in the office. Among them was an Italian count, an engineer who had captained a submarine and was captured off the coast of Florida. Henslee still has a letter from Count George Simioni sent to her after his return to Italy.
Mario Lorencini of Venice, Italy, penned two 81/2-by-11-inch white-on-black drawings Henslee kept through the years. One is a ship at sea. The other is titled "No Barbed Wire," showing lighted camp barracks with not a sign of fencing.
"They were all artisans," Henslee said. "They were all artists."
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