English: St. Mary Roman Catholic Church, 6919 Transit Road at Stahley Road, Clarence, New York, September 2022. One of the oldest churches in the Catholic Diocese of Buffalo, St. Mary's (or, as it was originally known, St. Mary's of the Assumption) has a history that dates back to the 1830s and is closely tied up with that of the hamlet in which it's located: Swormville, a community straddling the Amherst/Clarence town line that was gathered around the tavern and general store operated by Bavarian immigrant Adam Schworm, and whose initially German, Alsatian, and French settlers were overwhelmingly Catholic and desirous of a house of worship to call their own. Father John Nepomucene Neumann (later Saint John Neumann, the first male American Catholic to be canonized by the Vatican) was a local representative of the Redemptorist order whose job it was to hold services for those scattered Catholic communities of rural Western New York that were too small to sustain full-fledged parishes of their own. Father Neumann held Mass and administered sacraments wherever he could: first at the homes and barns of local residents, then beginning in 1839 at a converted log cabin that served as St. Mary's first permanent home. After Neumann's move to Philadelphia the next year, services were held even less frequently, usually by priests who visited periodically from SS. Peter and Paul in Williamsville. With the continued growth of Swormville, however, Buffalo bishop John Timon reestablished St. Mary's as a full-fledged parish in 1849 complete with its own resident pastor, Rev. John B. Menauer. Sixteen years later came the construction of its second and current home, this simple but handsome brick church building in a vernacular Romanesque Revival style (note the round arches crowning the entrance and stained-glass windows as well as the raking cornel tabes underneath the eaves of the roof).