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NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665
March 30, 2000
Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University
©2000 Plains Folk
By the time you read this, I expect to be a poorer man than when I wrote it. Sure, my wheat crop down south is coming along nicely with good spring rains, and like most people these days, I have a portfolio that's doing all right, too. I mean poorer in another way, as a citizen of the northern plains. I fear that in the next few days something will be lost that cannot be replaced at any cost.
Specifically, I'm talking about a country church called St. Philip's of Hirschville, in North Dakota's Dunn County. More generally, I'm talking about a pattern of behavior we have in this part of the country--what some people call the burn-and-bury impulse.
The burn-and-bury impulse is the compulsion to destroy all traces of buildings or other items of material culture that have outlived their apparent usefulness. It derives from the long-term trends of depopulation and retrenchment in the region. People move away, or perhaps technologies change, and we have structures standing unused. So we demolish them. To leave them standing entails issues of maintenance and liability. There is something more to it. Empty buildings are a symbol of failure, or at least misjudgment, with which we are uncomfortable. So we get rid of them and let things go back to grass, which is the forgiveness of nature.
So, the Diocese of Bismarck has proposed burning St. Philip's. This is a wood-frame church built in 1909 on land donated by Casper and Marianna Hirsch. It was built by the sweat and treasure of its parishioners, who were Germans from Hungary. They built well--the structural integrity of the building remains excellent--at a time when they saw a bright future for the country. After the 1930s, though, people moved away steadily, until in 1998 the parish became officially inactive.
Put this into perspective: Many churches on the northern plains have been destroyed by intentional burning. Burning is a sort of sacrificial means of destroying a church, respectful in a way, in that the church does not fall down or fall victim to scavengers. The St. Philip's situation is not unusual. Somehow, though, the fact that this sort of thing happens all the time, and not just once, brings me no comfort.
Then, too, there are some special circumstances in regard to St. Philip's. It is a church of the Germans from Hungary, a fascinating ethnic culture of the plains. The German-Hungarians, while numerous in North Dakota's West River area, never have been well organized to preserve and present their ethnic culture in a manner comparable, say, to the Germans from Russia. Consequently they have had little success in preserving their cultural sites.
More to the point, this particular church, St. Philip's, is uniquely significant to German-Hungarian ethnic culture because of certain details in the design. I know this from having visited and studied virtually all the German-Hungarian cemeteries in North Dakota and thus having become familiar with their religious symbols. I don't understand them completely, but I recognize them.
The key symbol in German-Hungarian religious art is a canopy design--sometimes a semi-circle, sometimes a pointed gable, like an A--that is placed above a cross or other religious depiction. All the homemade grave crosses in the St. Philip's cemetery have this canopy design, as does the central shrine cross in the cemetery. Intentionally, and beautifully, the German-Hungarians of St. Philip's built this same A-gable design into the entry to their church. They did this as a mark of identity and of piety.
I love the land and people of the northern plains. But when we fail to honor the faiths of our people, and fail to envision a place for beautiful creations like St. Philip's Church in our children's world, it makes me weary, and ashamed.
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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339
Editor: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136
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