Posted on 07/07/2002 4:59:37 AM PDT by Pharmboy
Prarie churches like Osterdalen Evangelical Lutheran at Harwood, N.D., are being abandoned. The church's contents were recently auctioned.
HARWOOD, N.D. — The hail came five minutes before auction time at the old church, just as the crowd had gathered under the oak trees. Perhaps it was a sign.
Many of those assembled were the great-grandsons and great-granddaughters of the Norwegian homesteaders who founded the white clapboard Osterdalen Evangelical Lutheran Church, where a soft blanket of barley grows practically to the front door. They had come to say goodbye.
The platters were the first to be auctioned, reminders of ham dinners every Fourth of July. Then came the pickle dishes, the stainless steel and silver forks, the wicks, the coffee urns, the Sunday school folding chairs, the Hammond double-keyboard organ, the long oak pews and the hymnals ("Take any hymnal you want — 10 bucks a hymnal — get them at 10-10-10."). The stained-glass windows were last to go.
"We wished the situation had been different," said the church's last pastor, the Rev. Carrol Tollefson, with sorrowful resignation, "but then reality sets in."
Mr. Tollefson led the final service, a year ago, after the church, built in 1895 and down to its last eight members, decided to close.
"We wish the Lord would send down a lightning bolt and take this building," he said.
With their steeples visible for miles, anchoring the distant landscape, the churches of North Dakota have been called the lighthouses of the prairie. Built by Norwegian, Swedish, German, Icelandic and other homesteaders who flocked to the treeless terrain in the 1880's, these windswept landmarks of rural life, beacons of faith and optimism, are rapidly vanishing.
The flight of people from the North Dakota countryside has been silently devastating to this obscure but historically significant rural architectural heritage. Erected by settlers every six miles or so, past where the pavement — as highways are called here — ends and dirt and gravel take over, prairie churches like Osterdalen are disappearing at a rapid rate.
Even as they do, former church members and neighbors, working singly or in small groups, are aggressively rallying to halt their demise. Some are restoring them out of their own pockets and resurrecting them for weekly services. Others are banding together to open them for special occasions, such as heritage services that draw hundreds of former members from out of state.
A survey in 1998 by the North Dakota Historical Society and other groups found that of the state's nearly 2,000 historic church buildings, at least 400 had been abandoned. Seventy-eight percent of them are in one-silo towns of 2,500 people or fewer, as farm economics have driven people to jobs far away.
Throughout the Great Plains, depopulation has left hundreds of historic churches vacant and at the mercy of the elements, said Jim Lindberg, assistant director of the National Trust for Historic Preservation in Denver, which placed the churches on its most endangered list last year.
Often the first public buildings created by settlers and the last to go — along with the local bar — churches represent an acute loss in North Dakota, where an average of nine people live per square mile and a typical town has fewer than 160 people, said Dr. Richard Rathge, the state demographer. The state also has the country's greatest proportion of people who are 85 years old and older.
In its 111-year-old life, Ringsaker Lutheran, along the banks of the Red River in Buxton, was home to 362 baptisms, 50 marriages, 97 funerals and innumerable lutefisk dinners for 600 people.
"When I was growing up, often the only occasion during the week where farm people got to socialize was at the church," said Kim Nesvig, 49, who grew up a mile west of Ringsaker. "It was a place to shoot the breeze. But there was only one kid left in Sunday school. It makes it hard to have a choir."
Spare as the landscape, the louvered steeples and shingled bell towers of these landmarks still bear eloquent witness to the Western settlement of the country. Built by local carpenters — the Sir Christopher Wrens of the prairie — they speak of a moment in the nation's history when homesteaders from across the sea, lured by railroad advertisements promising cheap and bountiful land, tried to carve out decent lives.
The homesteaders braved drought, prairie fires, floods, grasshoppers and horizontal snowstorms so ferocious that farmers would stretch twine from house to barn to guide them. In the great blizzard of 1887, many died of suffocation, smothered by the dense snow in the air and the force of the wind.
In the warm embrace of churches, farm families from Norway, Sweden and elsewhere, living miles from one another, preserved their cultures and forged communities. "The little churches speak of the human connection to the land," said Dale R. Bentley, the executive director of Preservation North Dakota, a nonprofit group based in Buffalo, N.D., which is trying to halt their demise.
"In North Dakota we are one generation from our roots," Mr. Bentley said. "Lose them and you lose the human connection to the prairie." Mr. Bentley's group recently started a statewide initiative to preserve endangered rural churches through a $100,000 "Save America's Treasures" grant, financed by a Congressional appropriation, and $100,000 from the J. M. Kaplan Fund, a private foundation in New York.
The sight of a fallen church, doors pinned perpetually open by the wind, can be wrenching.
"A church is kind of like a flag," said Duane Johnson, a member of the North Trinity Swedish Lutheran Church near Nash, which has 177 residents. "You should keep it up, or destroy it."
Tulla Froyen drove her camper 200 miles from her home in South Haven, Minn., to the auction at Osterdalen, spending the night parked in the green barley field beside the church. Her Norwegian ancestors are buried here, their century-old graves marked with fresh peonies. The setting, on high ground at the juncture of the Red and Sheyenne Rivers, has changed little, with the farmhouse on the old Strandvold place still standing along a ribbon of dirt that heads straight toward the infinite sky.
"When I first heard about the auction, I cried," said Ms. Froyen, 62, a retired teacher and resort operator. "But after being here and talking to the caretakers, I understand the problems they're up against."
The painful decision to close, as at other churches throughout the Great Plains, seemed inevitable. The church's few congregants, all of them elderly, could no longer afford a minister, upkeep and insurance. At Osterdalen, they voted against selling the church to a private buyer, worried that its future use would be incompatible with its sacred past.
Although the belfry is disintegrating from dry rot, church members plan to remove the bell — donated by Gerald Olsen's great-grandfather Elof — to the cemetery, where it will be on display as a memorial to the church. The fate of the building is uncertain.
Around the state, different choices are being made, often guided by Preservation North Dakota, which provides technical advice and small grants for rural church preservation. Many of the inactive churches are Lutheran, reflecting the faith in the homelands of their founders, while others are Russian and Ukrainian Greek Orthodox, German-Hungarian and Moravian. Synagogues, too, have been abandoned.
"It takes one person to save a church," Mr. Bentley said, adding that $5,000, along with volunteer labor, "is a roof and a paint job,"
The unlikely savior of the 1887 Hitterdal Lutheran Church near Milton, N.D., which closed in 1985, is David Haslekaas, 34, the fourth generation to farm his family homestead. In 1995, Mr. Haslekaas attended the auction of the church, which his Norwegian great-grandfather helped build, and proceeded to spend $6,000 rescuing practically the entire contents. He then bought the church itself for $1 from the church council, promising to maintain and restore it.
"Maybe I'm selfish," Mr. Haslekaas said recently, taking a break from working his wheat and soybean fields to relax with his wife, Jan, 29, and two children, Hayes, 2, and Greta, 6 months. "I didn't want to lose it. You see so many churches torn down and burnt. I wanted to keep it here."
When he got lost in the tall wheat as a boy, he would remember his parents' advice to "look for the church." He would throw paper airplanes from the balcony and steal away on weekdays to ring the bell.
"People wonder why we are putting money into something like this when we have a young family," said Ms. Haslekaas, who works as a nurse in nearby Langdon. "It's to honor the people who deeded the land. It's something the children will take pride in."
Greta was recently baptized in the church, and the couple hopes other families will follow.
Mr. Haslekaas painted the church with a neighbor, hoisted in a 30-gallon drum of paint that was suspended from a grain auger. "You make priorities," he said.
Elsewhere in North Dakota, new rituals are being born in old churches. On a recent Sunday morning, five families gathered for a sort of homegrown service, without a pastor, at the Island Lake Chapel, near Wolford (population 35), where the original kerosene lanterns still hang from the ceiling.
The church, now nondenominational, had been boarded up for 50 years until Nancy and Gary Wilbe and their neighbors resurrected it three years ago, pooling $10,000. The floor joists were caving in and "you could hear skunks and badgers scratching," Mrs. Wilbe recalled, adding: "Farmers would drive by and see some action, then pound nails. There's a real tie."
On rolling grassland near Denbigh (population 72), a Victorian jewel with pressed tin ceilings sits on a road so isolated that the only person who can admire it is the mail carrier. In 1997, when the church closed, members formed a trust to preserve the building. Recently, about 60 former members reunited for a heritage service — a growing summer tradition. They choose the day each year when Leonard Markusen can return from Iowa City to play the 1912 Packard pump organ.
Every Christmas Eve, undeterred by three-foot snow drifts, five elderly members of the former North Trinity Swedish Lutheran Church meet in the church yard, cellphones at the ready. At 6 p.m. precisely, Kenneth Johnson, 77, grabs two gnarled ropes to toll the bell, his friends punching telephone numbers wildly.
They call Bernice Hall in Minneapolis, Jody Frost in Boise, Avis O'Leary in Columbia, S.C., and Pat Hall in Pittsburgh, sharing with these former neighbors the familiar jubilant resonance.
Sometimes, Mrs. Hall, 51, will let her answering machine pick up just so she can hang on to the sound.
"Listen," she will say, calling her friends. "Here are my bells."
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