Rev. William Eckl Biography


	This biography appears on pages 265 in "History of Dakota 
	Territory" by George W. Kingsbury, Vol. V (1915) and was 
	scanned, OCRed and edited by Maurice Krueger, mkrueger@iw.net.

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				REV. WILLIAM ECKL. 

	Rev. William Eckl is the pastor of St. Joseph's church at 
Waverly. He was born in Bavaria, Germany, on the 5th of May, 1878. His 
parents, Francis and Theresa Eckl, are farming people and both are yet 
living. Their son William attended the parochial schools of Bavaria and 
in 1897, when a youth of nineteen years, crossed the Atlantic to the 
new world, settling first in Alabama, where he remained for a year. He 
then removed westward to Illinois, becoming connected with the 
Benedictine Monastery. He studied at Cluny, Illinois, for a time and 
pursued his theological studies in the St. Paul Seminary at St. Paul, 
Minnesota, thus qualifying for the priesthood. He was ordained on the 
13th of June, 1904, at St. Paul by Archbishop Ireland with a class of 
twenty-one, being ordained for the St. Paul diocese. He was then 
assigned to the church of St. Francis de Sales of St. Paul as assistant 
and there remained for fourteen months, after which he was appointed 
pastor of the Catholic church near Rogers, Minnesota, where he 
continued for four years. On the expiration of that period he came to 
South Dakota in the fall of 1909 and was assigned to duty in the parish 
of Hillsview, McPherson county, where he continued for a year and eight 
months, at the end of which time he was called to his present 
pastorate, in charge of St. Joseph's church at Waverly. Here he has 
made extensive repairs on the church property and has erected the 
present beautiful parish house. The congregation numbers about forty 
families and the work is well organized, there being an Altar Society 
and an Infant Jesus Sodality.