The Old Log Church--our story

He was just eleven years old, he says, when he was at the post office one Saturday, a place where, back then, the news got out every two weeks, when all those rural folks would come by to pick up mail. What he heard that morning, he says, is that there was a mass grave in a place not all that far away. It was 1866. The Dakota War was four years behind them--if all that blood could ever be, and Norway Lake was close to the heart of all that warfare.

That mass grave, he was told, was seven miles away. The next day, Sunday, Gabriel Stene says he decided to have a look, so he started out, skirting lakes and passing lean-to homesteads where Norwegian bachelor farmers were trying to put down roots a cold new land. 

When he got to the place he'd been told he could find that grave--13 people buried together, all victims of what they called "the uprising"--the farmer, a man named Andrew Monson, was hitching up his horse for a Sunday visit to his brother's place; but he took the time to be kind enough to point out the location of that stone that marked the spot. 

Gabriel Stene may have been expecting more. He says, "I found the grave which was not much to see." It was, he says, "A sunken neglected grave overgrown with weeds." 

He was alone, just a kid. It was a Sunday morning. He'd walked seven miles to get there. "Being only 11 years old, it had a sad effect on my boyish mind and brought tears to my eyes. I tried to eat a dry sandwich but could not do it."

How much later he put this whole experience together, I don't know. But when he wrote down his memories of those early days around Norway Lake, he said he couldn't help thinking that what was there at that messy gravesite was his story too.

"A sunken neglected grave overgrown with weeds. But every weed had a story underneath," he says. "My roots rest in that remains of 13 of those of that little Swedish colony who dressed that fatal Sunday morning to go and listen to a religious service,. . .little knowing that the clothes they put on that morning were to be their funeral garb."

There's a whole lot more to the long story Gabriel Stone left for his descendants, for his people, for the settlement around the Old Log Church at Norway Lake, Minnesota. 

In 1862, people left the colony, scared and horrified, left in droves, afraid of more danger. All those  Norwegians and the Swedes were bound and determined to get far enough away from what none of them wanted to think about or remember. 

But once it seemed that solid peace created a quiet quilt across the region, once the Indians were gone, the settlers moved happily back in to a landscape that looked so much like home in Norway, lakes and hills and patches of hardwoods. Six years later, in 1868, enough of them had returned to build the original Log Church.

The church tells the story in its own history, printed up right there at the sight north and west of Wilmar. Those eight years were greatly busy; there were "490 baptisms, 72 weddings, 142 confirmations, and 77 burials." For the record, that is, on average, more than a baptism a week.

Thus, sure as anything, life went on, don't you know? 

You've got to admire a place so committed to remembering its own story--its own stories, with a replica log church in a corner of land so far off the beaten path you have to look hard to find it. But that replica church is only a part of of the saga. The signs tell stories and explain that if you might just like to know more, you can go the website, where you'll find Gabriel Stene's book full of stories, a man who remembers a Sunday morning hike during his childhood, a hike of seven miles to a place people claimed 13 people were buried in a mass grave. Well, you know that.

It's history, and it's precious, and you have to be careful how you tell it, don't you?--because it's like Gabriel says: even though he wasn't there exactly when it happened, even though he was just a little shyster, eight years old at the time, his own roots, and ours, roots of every color somehow rest there too. 

These days, it seems to me we're in sad shape because we don't know how to tell our story. My story?--sure. I can do that. And yours, too, I'm sure.

But not ours. That takes some hard thought. It's not as easy as it may look when you stand there in the country at the old Log Church.