Plains Folk

NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665

March 25, 1999

Plains Folk: The Road Sign of a Cross

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

The northern plains are borderlands wherever you go, full of international and intercultural frontiers you cross at 60 mph without even knowing. Turning south off Highway 52 at Balfour, though, logging onto 53 for Ruso, I know I am crossing invisible lines distinguishing Ukrainians from Germans from Norwegians and God knows who else.

At one end is Kief, both its churches vacant on a bright Sunday morning. At the other end, in Ruso, the only attendees are 25 whitetails who stumble through the drifts ahead of me and mill about in the churchyard like a congregation reluctant to go in and face the sermon. In between is a rolling-to-rugged magpie landscape of pasture, CRP land, wheat and alfalfa in the benches.

The in-between exception is Butte, formerly Dog Den. Butte is a perfect T-town with grain elevators by the tracks, main street stretching north lined with a few businesses (Cenex, grocery, cafe, beauty shop), a beautiful old belfry-boasting brick grade school and modern high school at the north end, and holding down the town's flanks, Lutheran, Catholic, and Seventh Day Adventist churches.

Follow the jog east and north and you come to the Butte Cemetery, some four acres of burial ground behind a black steel sign with spruces around the perimeter. Nearby names on stones are Movchan, Skorick, Dossenko, Slavsky, Yegoshenko. Move over a little and you come to names like Norberg and Jacobson, and in between are ones like Bauer and Heringer.

HeringerFather William, 1877-1954, and Mother Sophia, 1888-1967chiseled on the stone. But next to the stone a great iron cross 6 feet tall is planted in the ground. No legend, no explanation. Must be a story there. This is not a wrought-iron cross in the German-Russian or Ukrainian tradition of grave marking. My old friend Dick Kasper, who grew up in Butte, said to call Neil Heringer in Butte about it. Neil, it turns out, is a blacksmith himself and the son of blacksmith William Heringer.

William Heringer, a German immigrant from Romania, came to Butte and began his blacksmith business in 1907 after first spending a few years in Minneapolis and Balfour. He did general blacksmithingwagon wheels, sleigh runners, farm machineryand turned out occasional specialty items. His son has a weather vane from the old shop on his garage today. And sometime before 1920, William Heringer made a cross to be placed on the gable of the German Lutheran church just south of Butte.

That church subsequently was moved over east onto the McClusky Road to serve another congregation. Neil Heringer let the people there know that if the church ever were to close, he sure would like to have that cross his father made. About 30 years ago, then, one of the church trustees called, and Neil went over to fetch the old cross.

"I didn't know what else to do with it, so I put it out there"in the cemetery, he explains.

As I said, this is not a cross made in the iron-cross grave marker tradition. It is a beautiful product of William Heringer's own design. The pieces of iron composing it are joined by rivets. The main frame of the cross is an outline of 1-inch square iron rods. The ornamentation fitted to the frame is mostly of 1-inch flat iron.

An oval of flat iron is set into the frame of each arm, with a larger circle around the intersection of the arms. Scrollwork ornaments the corners of the intersection. At center is a small cross inside the cross. The most unusual design motif is a set of four rays stretching out from the center between the arms, with each ray ending in a three-pronged spray, like a turkey foot. I've never seen anything quite like it.

I'm glad I took that turn into the borderlands of Highway 53.

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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339

Editor: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136