History

Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church of Rock Springs, Wyoming carries one of the most complex and historically layered founding stories of any Greek Orthodox parish in the American West, its origins woven together with the broader story of Orthodox immigration to the coal mining communities of the Rocky Mountain frontier.

Rock Springs drew immigrants from across the Orthodox world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Greeks and Slavic peoples alike drawn by the Union Pacific Coal Company's mines in Sweetwater County. By 1924, their numbers had grown large enough that Father T.V. Koch, a priest from Colorado Springs, arrived at the urgent request of the Orthodox community, which had no church of its own. The cornerstone of an Eastern Christian Orthodox church was laid on April 26, 1925, and on September 26, 1925, the newly dedicated building was blessed by Metropolite John of New York. At its dedication the congregation had a membership of sixty-one Slavic and forty-seven Greek parishioners, with reports noting three hundred Greeks in Rock Springs and two hundred more in Superior, alongside Russian, Serbian, Montenegrin, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Dalmatian members of the broader Orthodox community.

The church's early years were troubled by the broader political upheavals of the era. Communist authorities in Russia attempted to seize Orthodox church properties across America through the American courts by working through a defrocked priest, and parishes including Rock Springs suffered financial difficulties as a result. As these complexities unfolded, the Greek Orthodox community of Rock Springs took steps to secure its own footing. In October 1927, Bishop Kalistos, en route to his headquarters in San Francisco, stopped in Rock Springs to dedicate the church on Rainbow Avenue after it had been purchased by the Greek Orthodox congregation from the Eastern Orthodox community. Services in both Greek and English were celebrated that evening before an invited public audience.

Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church, established in 1925 and incorporated in Wyoming, has served the Orthodox faithful of Sweetwater County ever since, its approaching centennial in 2027 marking a full century of Orthodox Christian presence in the high desert of Wyoming.

Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church at 405 North Street in Rock Springs serves the Orthodox Christian faithful of southwestern Wyoming as a parish of the Greek Orthodox Metropolis of Denver within the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America.