News

Swedish Church turns 100

By Scott Wagar

07/02/2013

Editor’s Note: The Bottineau Courant is conducting a series on the history of the Swedish Zion Lutheran Church due to the church’s 110th Anniversary and structure being named to the National Register of Historic Places. This week, the Courant looks at the construction of the exterior of the church.

In the early part of  the 1900s, a group of men from the Swedish and Norwegian communities of Bottineau County converged on a piece of land in the north central part of the county just a short distance from the U.S. and Canadian border. As they entered onto the property for the first time, no doubt, some of these men probably just stood in their tracks and looked at the empty space before them, dreaming of the structure they were about to build, a church built of heavy, but graceful and beautiful stone. Other men, I am sure, were more than likely biting at the bit to get going on the project and were scrambling across the property to start the construction process.

The church was the Swedish Zion Lutheran Church, more commonly known as the Stone Church, which came into being on Nov. 19, 1900, when church members Ole and Maria Backman signed a bond of property over to the Swedish Lutheran congregation for three dollars.

It was the church members which took it upon themselves to build their church, but, with a little outside assistance from others.

“The church was built with the talent, time and treasure of its members, each accorded it with his/her ability and choice,” stated Gene Wunderlich in his book, “Stone Church: A Prairie Parable”. “A small contract for stone mason skills was the sole exception to this community-only church raising.”

The stonemasons included Sam Claus Lundquist, Thor Landsverk and his young brother Gunder Landsverk.  

Lundquist came from Chicago, lived in Souris with his wife and children, and was known as a mason and brick layer. The Landsverk brothers were Norwegian immigrants who migrated to Bottineau County at the turn of the 20th Century and had a reputation in the county as skilled masons.

Although not Swedish, they had a love and taste for stone and brought an artistic talent to the project.

The majority of the builders were made up mostly of farmers, but others held a variety of different occupations, some of which were directly involved in the church build, and others that were not. There was Peter Backman who was a professional stonecutter; John Lindstrom and John Oscar Anderson were carpenters; while Carl Forsberg, who was injured in a runaway horse incident and lost the use of his right hand and arm, was a road supervisor, tree salesman and also sold tombstones for a company out of Minnesota.

Although the builders came from different lifestyles, they all had one thing in common, they were frontiersmen and immigrants who were the sole providers in building up the county and making it productive land for the county and themselves.

“They came by train and wagon, carrying their modest belongings, family Bibles and Lutheran traditions,” Wunderlich stated. “To organize and build a church was as conventional as building homes, breaking sod or having babies.”

On that first day of construction they started in the ground, literally.  

“Because no photographs or journals record precise details of the church’s building, the process must be deduced from what can be observed and what were the best practices at the time. A building that is strong and straight after over a century must have been built to high standards. The first step was to build firm footings. Those high standards called for a trench at least four feet deep and four feet wide, twice the thickness of the wall, and filled with reinforced concrete and/or tightly mortared stone,” Wunderlich stated. “A footing for a buttress, too, should be at least twice as wide as the buttress, and extend from the rest of the wall footings. Footings are crucial to the integrity of heavy stone walls. These footings were made to support 350 tons of wall, based on structure dimensions and granite at 185 pounds per cubic foot.

“Atop the footings, base tiers of stone were carefully set, thus committing the alignment of the remainder of the walls. These base tiers, up to two feet above ground level, were three inches thicker than the upper portion of the walls. The additional thickness provides stability and imparts strength and solidity. The upper edge of the thicker base is marked by a level mortar line that passes along the bottom of concrete window sills. The stones on the upper edge of the base are beveled slightly downward. Buttress stones were set as an integral part of the wall so they, too, continue the same straight mortar line.”

As for placing the stones to create the foundation and tier base, that was no easy task.

“Without cranes and hydraulic loaders, all stone was moved by human hand,” Wunderlich stated.
So, in reality, the building of the Swedish Church didn’t actually start on the site with the workers, but in the fields and pastures around them to retrieve the stones.    

“The harvested stones in cultivated fields were deposited in piles. Larger stones were moved via horse-drawn “stone boat.” A stone boat consisted of two skids overlain with planks, hence low to the ground, so large stones could simply be rolled, rather than lifted, onto it. Smaller stones were thrown into a more mobile wagon,” Wunderlich stated.” For the builders of SZLC, some of the stone piles were sufficiently accessible to wagons to be a good source of building stone. Some stones were picked from areas that had yet not been cleared, such as land in pasture. They were hauled to the site, rough sorted, then shaped to be fitted. Some of the very large boulders were split into manageable fragments before transport.”

The mortar for the church, and the men who mixed it, was as unique and special to the church as its foundation was. The “mortar cement”, as it was called, was no ordinary mud, it was a mixture of Portland cement and lime along with sand, which gave the substance once it dried a sturdy, but flexible matter which allowed the walls to shift without fear of them cracking. (Portland cement is basic cement, which originated in Britain in the early 1800s (patented in 1824) and is stilled used today. The name comes from the Portland stone, which was a building stone that was quarried from the Isle of Portland in Dorset, England.)      

The remaining supplies, like lumber, nails, windows and doors would have come on the train to the City of Souris through the Great Northern Railroad. The local men would have met the train by wagon, loaded the supplies, and transferred them back to the church.

Once the foundation and tier bases were placed the corners would have been set next.

“Corners rose first, with long dimension of stones laid atop of one another alternately at right angles, thus locking the abutting walls together,” Wunderlich said. “Iron in the mortar reinforced the corners.”

From the corners, the main walls would began to raise from one course to next. As the walls grew from the base, the buttress stones were placed on the main wall through a locking process which granted the weight of the wall to fall upon the buttress, shifting the weight of the building and roof from the walls to the buttress, creating a strong, balanced, well-made structure.

Once to the base of the windows, the sills were molded and forms were put into place to construct the Gothic arches of the church windows and front door. As the forms were being placed, mason cutters broke, shaped and then set the stone around the forms.

“These pointed arches are the whispered elegance of the church’s stone work. The side lancet widows, and door, are essentially a column of stone; on the tops of each is an impost, a large stone supporting the voussoirs (stones forming the arch). The voussoirs in this church are smaller, more delicate and uniform than the stones in the wall side,” Wunderlich said. “At the point of the arch is a wedge shape stone, the key. The arched position of the windows is segmented by muntins (window partitions) that seemed to curve out to support the voussoirs. All the windows are the same size, about eight feet from bottom to point. Stone work for the eleven by four feet doorway matches that for the windows.”  

From the windows, the church volunteers set stone up to the top of the wall. While constructing the walls, the workers paid close attention to the color of the stones being mortared in, making sure the walls had an aesthetic appearance. They were meticulously in choosing different color stones for the walls that would  take away any insipidness or repetitiveness of the stone that made up the walls.
The walls also took time to set.

 “Sections of 150 lineal feet of wall were worked alternatively to allow the mortar to cure and strengthen before additional courses were added,” Wunderlich said. “For any one vertical segment to be completed (one day to lay two courses, six days to cure) six weeks were required. Given the length of the wall under construction , curing time for mortar should not have been limiting.”

When the workers made it to the top of the walls, mortar was leveled completely around the walls, bolts were set into the mortar, and were eventually utilized when the rafters and steeple where framed by attaching the bolts to heavy wooden plates.

The church members fastened the rafters, which were two by six feet in size, to the roof’s ridge line, which was 19 feet up and had a slope of 9/12 of a pitch. The rafters, themselves, not their base, were supported by cross members, which allowed the workers to place a barrel vault ceiling within the church.

To close up the interior of the church, flat timber was nailed down to the rafters and covered with cedar shingles.

When it came to the steeple, the carpenters first constructed a wooden base that is nine by eleven feet and secured it to the top of the stone wall which made up the entrance. Once that was completed, the steeple was built which raises 50 feet above the ground level and changes shape from a square base to an octagonal tower to a circular cedar roof. On top of the steeple is a decorative orb, which adds a distinct grace to the church.

Wunderlich believes the steeple and tower holds a great deal of Scandinavian symbolism and mythology when it comes to the agricultural area the homesteaders of the church worked and lived on.

“This fairly common steeple and tower embellishment is render here in attractive portions, bold but not overbearing,” Wunderlich said. “The steeple stands as a muscular statement reminiscent of Freyr, The Norse God of fertility who ruled over the rain, sunshine and crops.”

Wunderlich added that the planers for the church were either well educated in architecture or had a keen eye for stone structures.

“Remarkably, the length and width of the church are in a relation known as the “divine proportion” (about 1.618) a widely accepted standard of aesthetic excellence. Similar, the ratio of the steeple height to the church’s width closely approximates this ratio. Thus, SZLC is officially sanctioned as beautiful by time-honored measure of proportion and form. Were the proportions by design? Probably not by formula, but more likely by skilled builders with an eye for pleasing proportions.”

For those Swedish and Norwegian immigrants which converged to the church’s property that very first construction day to build their stone church, those immigrants, those pioneers, sod breakers, farmers, road workers, salesmen, men of simple lives and with little money must of have felt proud on the last day they walked away from the church they built with such elegant grace, standing tall over the rolling prairies of Bottineau County.