On October 14, 1873, Archbishop John McCloskey, responding to the appeals of local Catholics, assigned the Rev. Patrick J. Maguire to be the first resident priest in Irvington. A well-educated and strong-willed man, Father Maguire had been assigned to the Church of the Immaculate Conception on East 14th Street in Manhattan. From the moment he arrived in Irvington, he deter­ mined to build a church of the same name in the quiet village where the streets were still unpaved and rows of interlacing elms formed anarchway over the Post Road, as Broadway was then called.
 
For years, the Catholics in the area had been forced to improvise. Earlier in the century, Father John Hackett had come down from St. Teresa's in Tarrytown to say Mass in a hall at the foot of the hill near the railroad depot. Then, in 1864, the Catholic families took title to a wooden, one-room building that had once been a schoolhouse in Pennybridge and apparently had served as a temporary barracks during the Civil War. At the time of its acquisition, this building was located on an estate on North Broadway that was owned by the Hopkins family, who were to continue to be helpful to the church as time went by. The structure was eased down the Main Street hill and installed on South Ferris Street, where it was converted into a church for the use of visiting priests. The building was also used as a community center, and it must have been a festive spot. "Laughing begins at 8:00 o'clock;' declared a notice in the Yonkers Statesman, advertising a village event that was to occur in the hall.
 
The Irish immigrants had settled so thickly in East Irvington that the district became known as "Dublin'.'
 
Arriving to take over his post, Father Maguire discovered that the parish "Was so poor that it had no chaIice for the Eucharistic celebration. Worse, the parish could not even secure lodging for him within the village. In the1870's, many of Irvington's Catholics were employed as servants on the great estates of Field, Reid, Astor and others of the nation's wealthiest families. Other members of the parish were laborers, mostly Irish and Italians, who had been imported to work on the Croton Aqueduct, opened in 1842, or on the railroad that connected the village to New York City in 1849.