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The Valley Grove Preservation Society seeks to maintain two historic churches listed on the National Register of Historic Sites, both in the Valley Grove Cemetery grounds, as well as taking responsibility for managing the surrounding 50-acre oak savanna restoration.
Two historic Norwegian immigrant churches sit on a hill in the farm valley south of Northfield, Minnesota near Big Woods State Park in a panorama of prairie and oak savanna.
The Valley Grove Preservation Society members are stewards for the two Valley Grove churches, the 1862 stone church and the white clapboard church built in 1894 and also for the surrounding 50 acres of rolling prairie grasses and trees.
Valley Grove Lutheran Church, the congregation that met for services in the white clapboard church structure– was de-commissioned after the congregation disbanded in April 1973. The decline in farming and the growth in other churches contributed to the loss of the old church community.
Valley Grove is on the National Register of Historic Sites. Under the oak tree in the southwest corner of the churchyard, Pastor Bernt Julius Muus from Norway baptized 52 children in 1859; he went on to help found St. Olaf College. Many of the memorial stones are in Norwegian , and the graveyard contains the family plot of the innovative Veblen family, whose son was economist Thorstein Veblen.
The Valley Grove Cemetery Association, which owns the limestone church then in use as a Guild Hall, became the owner of the clapboard church a year after the congregation disbanded.
DSC_1336
The Valley Grove Preservation Society seeks to maintain two historic churches listed on the National Register of Historic Sites, both in the Valley Grove Cemetery grounds, as well as taking responsibility for managing the surrounding 50-acre oak savanna restoration.
Two historic Norwegian immigrant churches sit on a hill in the farm valley south of Northfield, Minnesota near Big Woods State Park in a panorama of prairie and oak savanna.
The Valley Grove Preservation Society members are stewards for the two Valley Grove churches, the 1862 stone church and the white clapboard church built in 1894 and also for the surrounding 50 acres of rolling prairie grasses and trees.
Valley Grove Lutheran Church, the congregation that met for services in the white clapboard church structure– was de-commissioned after the congregation disbanded in April 1973. The decline in farming and the growth in other churches contributed to the loss of the old church community.
Valley Grove is on the National Register of Historic Sites. Under the oak tree in the southwest corner of the churchyard, Pastor Bernt Julius Muus from Norway baptized 52 children in 1859; he went on to help found St. Olaf College. Many of the memorial stones are in Norwegian , and the graveyard contains the family plot of the innovative Veblen family, whose son was economist Thorstein Veblen.
The Valley Grove Cemetery Association, which owns the limestone church then in use as a Guild Hall, became the owner of the clapboard church a year after the congregation disbanded.