Lux Fest, 2021

It was a once-in-a-lifetime chance for an elementary-school gym's worth of red-blooded Luxembourgian genealogists to show off the research otherwise done on kitchen tables and in front of computer screens, to jabber on endlessly about Great-Aunt Bertha who, with her step-mother, happened by an shop in the old country and actually smiled at the Grand Duke, who just happened by himself. "Read it in an old letter I found in a Bible"--that kind of thing. "Got it translated by old Uncle Rudolf." 

You know.

The gym was full of yarn-swapping, family chroniclers, a beautiful thing to behold really, lots of 'em. It was their day, all about them and what they knew about the ancient past, the 150th anniversary commemoration of the arrival of a caravan of ox-drawn wagons to a place so void of trees that in order to avoid wind and snow and hail, they had to be built their homes from sod. 

It was one grand opportunity for old folks to have some say in things by reminiscing with swarms of others just as anxious to honor both the hard times and all the prairie sweetness. Lux Fest was all about history--Luxembourgian-American history; and most of the crowd in that gym were trigger-happy, kitchen table genealogists, armed with endless stories they'd stored up during endless years of trying to decipher old letters. 

It's not a huge story, really, because Luxembourg, the country, is not much bigger than Plymouth County, Iowa, where most of their pioneer families put down roots. Even today, Luxembourg has considerably less than a million people--an inch or two more than 600,000. As many as ten percent of the country emigrated to America in the 19th century, a high percentage but just a fraction of those many thousands who departed neighboring Germany or even the Netherlands.

They showed up on the vast prairies of the far corner of the state of Iowa in the very same year, 1870, as the Dutch, two bastions of contrasting and contrary ethnics, steeply Roman Catholic Luxembourgians and stiff-necked Dutch Reformers, all of them pretty much incapable of speaking English, the language of their adopted home. 

They'd be proud to go on and on about their conviction to build a church for the community. In fact the "St. Donatus Site" marks the original settlement and the spot where the first church was built, the "Prairie Church."

Today, there's only a memorial out there.

And a bible verse.

And a brand new sign.

For 150 years we've been neighbors, sometimes sworn enemies, sometimes just rivals, sometimes friends. These days, some of us are part of them, and some of them are part of us, and we're all part of we, I'd guess. Our ancestors didn't come out here to the far corner of the state together, but they arrived at the same time, 1870. As Euro-American communities, we're the same age. Saturday, our neighbors, the Luxembourgians, celebrated the birthday of their community here in the rich black soil of Siouxland. 

Lux Fest didn't have the pop of Tulip Festival--no street scrubbing, no cotton candy or Tilt-a-whirls, no Pride of the Dutchmen band. Without a doubt, however, it had more stories. . .lots and lots more stories.

Did you know that during that first decade here, when there was no church yet, if a family wanted attend Christmas mass in LeMars (a dozen houses maybe, still a very, very small village), they'd start from home at midnight. With oxen, it took hours to go twenty miles. They had no horses--they were too poor.

Lots more stories. Lots and lots more stories.