In 1880, when settlers from Poland began to build up farms and homes on the prairies of what was to become northeastern South Dakota, they also wanted to grow in their faith.

They eventually formed the congregation of St. Joseph Catholic Church of Grenville, a tiny town on the northern shores of Waubay Lake.

My father-in-law used to love driving. Whether it was to the corner convenience store for a cup of coffee and a newspaper or to an out-of-the-way truck stop for soup and pie, Dale Hult loved to going out to eat, seeing other regulars at cafes and teasing waitresses with nonstop dad jokes. The day we sold his minivan was perhaps one of the saddest of his life. Dementia stole his ability to motor about eastern South Dakota safely a few years ago, though he held on as long as he could (and maybe a little longer than his family would’ve preferred). He lives in a nursing home now, where naps are more his speed.

One of his favorite destinations during his late rambling years was the Sunday morning service at Komstad Church, just a couple miles from the “homeplace,” his term for the farm south of Centerville, South Dakota, where he and his brother grew up. The church was a trek from his home in Huron, so he and his beloved wife, whom he lost last year, would make it a weekend getaway. They’d eat at Truck Towne, spend the night at a motel and attend Sunday worship in the place his ancestors helped establish.

A year into his role as Komstad Covenant Church pastor, Dan Davey’s focus is relationships.

Confirmation classes and an adult Bible study bring people together, he said, and he’s also working to make connections outside the walls of the rural church southwest of Beresford, South Dakota.

Two white spires stretch from the corn fields toward the sky northwest of Volin, South Dakota.

They are the familiar local landmark of Faith United Lutheran Church, and for many who have roots in the church stretching through generations, they are home.

It’s midweek at a small country church in northeastern South Dakota. The building at the intersection of two Marshall County roads, more than 20 miles from any town of more than a few hundred people, sits under a dark winter sky. But the lights inside are on, and kids of all ages are abuzz.

Some warm up with dance moves on the backlit altar. Some giggle at eachother’s artistic efforts during a game of Pictionary. Older kids file downstairs and settle at two large tables where they pass around BeanBoozled, a game involving jelly beans where players take chances at chewing a pleasant or putrid flavor.

Central Lutheran Church sits among farm fields halfway between Fairfax and Franklin, Minnesota.

Central to the church’s mission has always been sharing God’s word and creating a welcoming community.

Tyler Greathouse got his hands dirty in his first call as a young pastor at an aging rural church in a ghost town called Carter, South Dakota.

Located in ranch country between Winner and the Rosebud Indian Reservation, it didn’t take long for church neighbors to invite Pastor and his growing family to help with cattle work. He slipped in a muddy pen on one early outing, but he didn’t mind.

“It’s kind of one big family,” said Earl Albert, a longtime member of Seney United Methodist Church.

Located in the tiny community of Seney not far north of Le Mars, church members are preparing for a family reunion of sorts. They’ll celebrate 150 years since the church was founded with a special worship service, lunch, coffee and cake June 9.

There was plenty to deter early settlers along the Minnesota River valley in Nicolette County – from crop losses and scarlet fever to tensions with Native American neighbors. But members of Immanuel Lutheran made the church and Christian education a priority.

Those priorities remain today as the congregation embraces a spacious new church building and ardently supports a cozy parochial school.

The Covey Church in northwest Iowa hasn’t held weekly church services since 1959, but the 140-year-old building and small cemetery remain as lasting reminders of the homestead days and the trials settlers from that era faced.

On the edge of a busy county road between Hartley and Sutherland, Iowa, the white clapboard building is noted for being the first wooden church building in O’Brien County. Now it serves as a historic landmark, a scenic rest-stop setting and an occasional wedding venue.

Camaraderie and community support make Union Creek Lutheran Church what it is.

It’s been that way for 150 years.

Churchgoers at Preston Christian Church are used to sitting in chairs that overflow into the fellowship hall, but they will have new accommodations this spring.

A new sanctuary and entryway being built onto the country church north of Bruce, South Dakota, will be able to hold 280 people, twice as many as the current space.

When choir students from Bethany Lutheran College make the rounds on their spring tour out of Mankato, Minnesota, the director has special instructions when they stop to perform at Rock Dell Lutheran Church in rural Redwood County.

Recently retired after nearly 40 years at Bethany, director Dennis Marzolf tells his students to take a moment in the country church and soak it in.

From atop a hill 11 miles due south of Beresford, South Dakota, Roseni Lutheran Church is a monument to history, dating back to the Norwegian settlers who founded the congregation more than 150 years ago.

But its future is bright.

A church with Swedish heritage sits just off a curving county road, overlooking one of Minnesota’s 10,000 lakes.

Sillerud Lutheran Church, southwest of Balaton, Minnesota, is celebrating 150 years since it was founded. Several church members are descendants of the Swedish church founders, but others who have arrived more recently have found a home in the country church. Members old and new appreciate its rich history, along with all of the changes that have come through the decades.

In the 4 ½-mile span between two rural Minnesota churches, whitetail deer run through reed-covered marshes and take cover in tree-filled draws.

Bald eagles land on tilled fields looking for sustenance where snow has melted off the otherwise white landscape.

A block off of Main Street sits one of Groton, South Dakota’s oldest buildings, the first church built after the city was founded in 1881.

Behind Trinity Episcopal Church is an empty lot that once served as a baseball field. Home plate was directly under the tall stained glass windows custom made in Connecticut to be the altar’s colorful backdrop.

The members of Templeton United Church of Christ like being together.

That’s evident in the way they laugh as they share memories about growing up in the small rural church that sits between farm fields west of Wessington Springs, South Dakota.

Sitting on the countryside of eastern Kingsbury County, South Dakota, the Lake Whitewood Church looks much the same as it did in photographs from its 1906 dedication.

The landscape, however, changed significantly in just the last year when a tornado and derecho winds took down 26 towering evergreen trees that were planted in 1914.

At first there were two.

Since the 1880s, Lutherans near the village of Storla, South Dakota west of Mitchell supported two churches. They shared in youth gatherings and summer picnics. They shared in tragedy as well, when both church buildings were blown down in one big summer storm in 1924. They each rebuilt and continued their work for another 90 years.

While cars speed by at 80 mph on Interstate 29 between South Shore and Watertown, South Dakota, a mile away there’s an unassuming country church that holds a beautifully grand piece of history.

St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church looks like many white clapboard churches from the late 1800s with arced stained glass windows down the sides and a steeple making its signature roofline.

The older generation at Bergen Lutheran Church in rural Day County, South Dakota, has fond memories of participating in national gatherings of Lutheran kids.

Betty Lou Rhode was one of four local girls to go to the first big youth event in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. John E. Sigdestad and Kenny Anderson went to the 1955 gathering in San Francisco, and John’s brother David Sigdestad made the trip to Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1960.

A stately and sturdy church sits on the edge of the northeastern South Dakota town of Strandburg.

Red brick stretches to the ornate bell tower. Inside, dark wooden railings and yellow stained glass lead to the balcony where you can look down on the gleaming pipe organ and the hand carved wood of the Gothic style altar and matching pulpit. The centerpiece is a statue of Jesus said to be made by Gutzon Borglum of Mount Rushmore fame.

Alongside a county highway 8 miles south of Bath, South Dakota, there’s a stately tombstone with a cryptic message.

It belongs to Halsten O. Docken, born Nov. 14, 1845 and died Oct. 3, 1897. At its base is engraved:

At the end of a narrow gravel street on the edge of what was once a small railroad town, a blonde brick church stands as a stately guard over a quiet cemetery.

The small town of Onaka, South Dakota, in northwestern Faulk County has faded to about a dozen houses, a tiny post office, a park with antique equipment, a seldom used community hall and a bar that’s open three days a week. The town’s only surviving church, St. John the Baptist Catholic Church, will hold its last service June 13. It hasn’t been decided what will happen to the brick building, but the handful of members that call St. John’s home hope to give it a fitting farewell.

At a spacious country church in rural Dimock, South Dakota, there’s a tiny room to the side of the altar where you’ll find the inner workings of a grand pipe organ.

Before the organ was electrified, a teenage boy would sit there during Sunday services, pumping the bellows to fill the wind chest. The boys got 25 cents for their work, and they also took liberties to scrawl their names on the wooden components that fill the room. There are penciled initials, dates, hearts with a cupid’s arrow, even a cartoon tractor.

Rural church invites visitors to stop and stay a while

Rural churches were once the center of life on the prairie, but it’s become a struggle to keep people involved.

Pastor Paul Krause may only be in his sixth year of serving the rural congregation at Zion Lutheran Church of rural Estelline, South Dakota, but he’s found plenty of personal connections in that time.

The Wisconsin-native comes from a long line of pastors on his mom’s side of the family. He was serving in Markesan, Wisconsin when he got the call to South Dakota, serving both Trinity Lutheran in Watertown as well as Zion, a country church in what’s known as the Hidewood Township of Deuel County.

It’s a small clapboard country church with simple furnishings, but the music is heavenly.

The members of Kellerton United Methodist Church of rural Hazel, South Dakota, find great joy in the music that accompanies Sunday services.

This summer, members a country church between Hartford and Wall Lake in southeastern South Dakota will celebrate 140 years as a congregation.

The roster of confirmed members still includes several names carried from the 33 German families who were charter members of Wall Lake Zion Gemeinde at its founding June 6, 1881.

Lake Campbell Lutheran Church, in southern Brookings County, South Dakota, turned 150 years old last summer, and a grand celebration was planned.

The coronavirus pandemic caused the party to be put on hold. Church members commemorated the anniversary instead by ringing the church bell 150 times on June 13, the date in 1870 when the church was founded.

Last Christmas, Merlin Boese shared something special with the children in his church, the Friedensberg Bible Church south of Avon, South Dakota.

It was something he received as a boy at Christmas time – a picture of Jesus the shepherd signed by his Sunday school teacher and dated December 1929, when Boese was just about to turn 5 years old.

When you pour a cup of coffee at Sun Prairie Baptist Church, the aroma hits you with a rich roastiness and you know there’s something different about this little country church on the South Dakota prairie.

Church coffee isn’t usually on par with the five dollar lattes served at trendy downtown coffee shops, but here, it is.

Mission Sunday has always been a special time at St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, located on the edge of the town of Henry west of Watertown, South Dakota.

Held the last Sunday of June, there’s always a special worship service with a guest speaker. When Carlos and Anita Abraham were young, Mission Sunday was a day-long event with a picnic and games. There were two services with food served in between.

A church can feel like home, and for Jaimie Odde, it was a cure for homesickness. 

Odde grew up in Sioux Falls. Her husband’s family ranch and a teaching job brought her to the Pollock area in north central South Dakota. She also grew up hearing her grandpa Leroy Iseminger preach, so when she was looking for a church to attend, he referred her to a friend who pastored in the area. He told her she had to go to Norway Lutheran, located north of Glenham, South Dakota.

If not for the square, white bell tower, the historic building southwest of Milbank, South Dakota, would look like a settler’s cabin.

Hand-hewn oak logs make up the walls, ax marks still visible where the timber was made to fit. The original caulking has been replaced with concrete, the dirt floor is now cement, and the pane glass windows have been restored. The Brown Earth Indian Church is a monument to a time when two cultures clashed on the northern prairie

A small church in the northern reaches of South Dakota is looking toward the future.

Young families make the church a lively place. Parents of young kids are stepping into leadership roles as church deacons, and older generations are working to make a welcoming atmosphere for kids.

I grew up just down the hill from our church in Clear Lake, South Dakota. Thank goodness we lived close, because my dad was usually still knotting his necktie as we walked out the door minutes before the service was set to begin.

On Christmas Eve, as we make the walk in the dark of a winter evening, my mom likes to remind everyone of the year I was born. A blizzard kept most people from attending the candle light service that year. My parents wrapped me in blankets and battled the wind on the walk to the church’s double doors.

St. John Lutheran Church sits on a rocky ridge west of Dimock, South Dakota. There was no shortage of rocks that members hauled to the church site and crushed for cement or used for the church foundation.

“God was figuring for expansion because he put a lot of rocks here,” church member Jim Neugebauer said.

After a snowy winter, members of Goodhue Lutheran Church are ready to hear the Easter message of hope and renewal.

The Easter sunrise service is the first Sunday worship service the country church northwest of Florence, South Dakota, will host this year, and it’s a meaningful one. Goodhue Lutheran, part of a three-point parish, has continued the tradition of hosting the early morning Easter service since 1952. Only one year was it canceled – 1975 – due to a blizzard.

For nearly 95 years, Trinity Lutheran Church outside of Oldham, South Dakota, has held just one service a year, on Memorial Day.

Year round, though, the church serves as a memorial to founding families who dedicated their lives to building the little church on a sloping prairie hill.

Christmas is a time when Big Springs Baptist Church dives into its history.

A special “Founders’ Service” is held across the road from modern church building. There sits a small white clapboard building that first served as the Big Springs place of worship in 1874.

There’s a tiny country church in the sparsely populated hills north of Murdo, South Dakota, where the only sounds that break the silence are the chipping of birds and the creaking cattle gates moving in the wind.

Immanuel Lutheran Church is located 17 miles down a roller coaster ribbon of gravel road. Its simple cross-topped steeple looks over acres of grazing lands, home to Ted Turner’s buffalo herds.

There was a time when low attendance and dwindling funds pointed to the end of the rural Dawson Covenant Church in southwestern Minnesota, but today, a focus on youth programs has helped the church thrive and grow. 

In the last two years, the church has added on to its relatively new building and hired a youth pastor. The church south of the town of Dawson is led by two young pastors with growing families of their own. They’ve helped set the tone for a church that values its youngest members.

Members of a small country church near Howard, South Dakota, were sorry to see the church’s final service come on a June Sunday two years ago, but something that happened during the Lord’s Prayer made it feel like the generations of church members were watching over them.

In honor of their ancestors who founded the church in 1881, they recited the prayer in Norwegian. As they did, a ray of sunlight shined over Jesus’s head on the altar painting – a depiction of Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, according to those at the service. There was a mummer through the pews as people took notice.

Benton Lutheran Church sits on a hill west of Crooks, South Dakota, as a white, steepled beacon.

The historic building is more than just a place of worship and fellowship, though. It’s a sort of community hub where rural residents come for massages and foot care and – during certain seasons – to purchase what some claim are the best homemade pies available for sale.

Phil Gunderson and Lloyd Sorlien remember when their church was just a pile of field rocks. Now it’s a uniquely constructed stone church tucked away in the rolling hills that descend into the James River Valley south of Menno, South Dakota.

When Gunderson and Sorlien were young in the 1940s, Our Savior’s Lutheran Church was just a basement with a roof. The congregation had plans for a grander place of worship, but they were put on hold during World War II while supplies went to war efforts.

When Emily Wehde sits in the pews of Swedona Evangelical Covenant Church each Sunday, she’s in the place four generations before her have found home. 

Wehde, 24, lives in Sioux Falls but carries on the tradition of playing an active role in the country church near her childhood home north of Brandon, South Dakota.

Inside the walls of the 128-year-old Lake Madison Lutheran church are books older than the building itself. They keep records of its members going back generations. They tell personal stories of their lives, and they recount major milestones in the congregation’s history.

Some records are hand written in Norwegian, the perfect scrawl on now-yellowed pages of withered books. Some biographies are organized in three-ring binders, complete with colorized portraits. Others are newspaper clippings pasted in scrapbooks.

Behind the wooden pews of Zoar Lutheran Church near Revillo, South Dakota, mismatched chairs surround a large table.

It’s where women of the church gather two times a month to spend the day making quilts. They piece together fabric in patchwork designs and tie colorful tufts of yarn to secure the batting for the warm blankets.

Fields are frozen and covered in snow. The grain is in the bin, and producers are making plans for next season.

That means that our team of crop watchers gets a break. In place of our regular producer reports on Page 6, you’ll find a different feature.

Bible school at New Hope Lutheran near Hayti, in eastern South Dakota brought out some special traditions.

Kids at their sack lunch outside on the steps leading to the white clapboard church. The youngest kids sat at the bottom, and each year, they would graduate until they got to sit at the top. Once lunch was done, one lucky kid got the favorite job of ringing the church bell.

Attendance at Wood Lake Lutheran Church on South Dakota’s eastern border isn’t what it used to be.

Where large farming families used to pack the pews and fill out the choir each Sunday, now fewer than 20 people regularly attend services at the 125-year-old clapboard building north of Astoria, S.D.

After 133 years of worshiping on the prairie of southern Lake County in eastern South Dakota, St. Peter Lutheran Church members will attend the final service there the Sunday after Easter, but St. Peter will continue on in different ways.

Members of the church south of Madison, S.D., near the tiny community of Orland, have talked about closing for several years. A 19-1 vote last August made the decision final, and they decided that Easter would be a fitting celebration on which to end.

There’s a church that sits along the highway five miles west of the eastern South Dakota town of Bryant, and its tall steeple serves as a sign for out-of-state travelers that they’ve almost made it to their favorite fishing spot at the nearby lakes.

“It’s a landmark, that’s for sure,” said Evelyn Thue, who at 96 has memories of Garfield Lutheran Church when it was bustling with dozens of area families attending services each Sunday.

Caring for others runs deep in the family of Dwight Knutson, who farmed for decades north Platte, S.D., and now rents his land.

When he was young, his family took in a transient Irish worker. He showed up one day asking for a job, Knutson said, and he lived and worked with the family, milking cows and doing chores, for years until he died. Dwight’s mother also raised foster children alongside her own.

When the Aurora Reformed Church was built in 1914, the simple clapboard building with a squared steeple sat alone on the countryside of southern Aurora County, S.D., about 35 miles east of the Missouri River.

It was the place of worship for a tight-knit Dutch community.

One rural church in southeastern South Dakota is looking to the future by preserving the past and celebrating one of the things that make country churches so special: A serene setting in the heart of nature.

Beaver Valley Lutheran Church sits on the corner of two highways near the Iowa border. Today, the steepled brick building is not too far from the sprawling developments of the city of Brandon, about three miles from Valley Springs.

Usually, one of the best parts of a church gathering is the food.

That's no different when I get an opportunity to visit rural churches for our Prayers on the Prairie series. We talk church history over coffee. Sometimes there are warm caramel rolls or freshly baked coffee cake. Church members go out of their way to make me feel welcome. On a visit to one church without running water, my hosts even thought to bring a thermos of coffee and disposable cups.

When members of Vangen Lutheran Church talk about the “old church,” they aren’t referring to the 100-year-old brick building in the southeastern South Dakota town of Mission Hill.

The “old” Vangen Lutheran is a steepled country church on a gravel road east of town. Built in 1869, it’s considered to be the oldest Lutheran church still standing in the Dakotas.

Remnants of the past are scattered across the rolling hills that make up the countryside south of Gregory in south-central South Dakota.

Some are ruins, like the cement floor of a honey processing plant where a disastrous fire sent melted beeswax running downhill and put an end to honey-making. Some are holdouts from an earlier era, like the Hilltop Drive-Inn Theater and Carlock Dancehall, both of which still provide entertainment on summer nights.

None of the folks who take care of Pleasant Hill Chapel have ever attended worship services there on a regular basis, yet the sense of community that they find at the little chapel near Spink, S.D., and the pride they take in preserving it are profound.

The Pleasant Hill Chapel sits on a hilltop in Union County, in South Dakota’s far southeastern corner. The white steepled church is surrounded by corn and bean fields, pastures full of red and black cattle and farm homes.

At a time when many rural churches are closing as members age, move to cities or opt out of church services altogether, a Lutheran church in Vienna, S.D., is stretching for space to hold its over-full Sunday school classes.

Bethlehem Lutheran Church sits on the main street of the east-central South Dakota farm town. Vienna is a quiet town without much more than a grain elevator and one bar, but the church is thriving with families that come from 20 to 30 miles away.

There’s a small and simple church that sits in the heart of Tabor, and it well sums up the heritage of that tiny southeastern South Dakota town as a Czech settlement and a farming community.

Tabor is big on celebrating its Czech heritage, and the church is cherished as what is thought to be the first Catholic church that Czech immigrants built in Dakota Territory. It’s now well preserved on the lot behind the town’s museum, along with other historic buildings – a schoolhouse, a jail and a store – but the church spent most of its existence filled with grain on a nearby farm.

Our winter feature on rural churches had me traveling to many tiny towns – some I never had heard of before a member of a nearby country church gave me a call.

There was Gaylord, S.D., Wilno, Minn., and Clayton, S.D.

A small Norwegian church on the Minnesota-South Dakota border has a connection to several significant events in Midwestern history, and over its 140-plus years, it has made a mark of its own in the surrounding communities and in the lives of its members.

Singsaas Lutheran Church sits in Brookings County, S.D. but it is nearest the town of Hendricks, Minn. Named for a town in central Norway, the church got its start in October 1874 at the home of Norwegian immigrant Nils Trooien.

The bell at Pioneer Lutheran hung below the church’s white steeple for 100 years. On April 19, 2009, it came crashing down into a pile of ashes as the church burned that day.

Church member Larry Holler remembered watching it fall. A phone call woke him about 1 or 2 a.m., and a neighbor told him that the nearby country church was on fire. He had to look out his bedroom window and see for himself to believe it.

Among the farm fields and hog barns northwest of Wilmont, Minn., on the edge of a tiny community where fewer than a dozen people reside stands a pretty standard-looking white wood frame church.

But inside, the church holds something special – relics of the past that have served the small Catholic community for more than 100 years.