After her mom died four years ago and her two nieces got married, Kruzich set out to put together a family history and collect family recipes for a cookbook to pass down to her children and her nieces.

About the same time, her home church St. Patrick’s Catholic Church, which originally stood in the nearby ranching and logging community of Brown’s Gulch was badly in need of restoration, including a new cedar shake roof.

Her grandfather helped build the church, comprised of 134 hand-cut logs and dedicated in 1922. In 1972, the rustic 20-by-40-foot church was moved to Butte’s World Museum of Mining and used as a storage shed. About 10 years ago, it underwent its first restoration and has since been used for meetings and presentations and as an interpretive center.

“I had been talking with my 92-year-old aunt and learned about how my grandfather helped build the church and the 170 residents of Brown’s Gulch who worshipped in it,” Kruzich said.

During a visit to the mining museum, she saw firsthand all the work and material needed to restore the church. Then she cooked up an idea.

“Since the museum is a nonprofit organization without a lot of financial resources, I decided to finish the cookbook, sell it and use the proceeds to fix up the church,” she said. “It was also a way to display community spirit, something all of us at PPL Montana take seriously.”

The initial $600 in sales from her “Recipes from the Little Church on the Hill” helped purchase paint, sealer, tar paper and a set of cedar shingles.

Working with the museum, Kruzich and other volunteers plan to rechink the logs and add interpretive materials to help tell the story of the church and its importance to the people of Brown’s Gulch.

I’m still selling the cookbook we have a lot of painting left to do and I want to do some work on the logs on the outside of the church,” said Kruzich, who also volunteered her labor for the restoration.