After twenty-five years, the Catholics in the vicinity of Harvard University had grown so much that a "chapel of ease" was needed for their use, and in 1873 the meeting house of the Shepherd Congregational Society (including organ) was purchased at $20,000 for this purpose. The Congregationalists had erected this small wooden structure on the northwest corner of Mt. Auburn and Holyoke Streets (the present site of Holyoke Center) in 1830 and had twice enlarged it. The appropriate alterations were quickly effected, and two days before Christmas the building was opened for the worship of the 1200 Catholics in the area. References to the St. Paul church in its first fifty years regularly name the famed Fr. Manasses Dougherty as the founder, and tablets in the vestibule of both St. Peter's and old St. Paul's marked the memory of the pioneer priest whose funeral in 1877 drew three thousand mourners.