July 19, 2001

Plains Folk: A Sermon in Stone

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

The pale water tower of Fairmount loomed above as I read again the passage from the 1938 WPA guide to North Dakota: "Of interest in the town is the widely known Sermon in Stone, an obelisk erected in St. Anthony's Roman Catholic churchyard by Rev. G.C. Bierens. Stones and ores, some semiprecious, have come from all parts of the world to be patterned into this bright-colored shrine."

The white-clad St. Anthony's Church was easy to find, and there, between the church and the white-frame sacristy, was the Sermon in Stone--two striking obelisks. Garish, you might say. Intricate, layered, even beautiful, I would say.

Father G.C. Bierens was the parish priest responsible for the construction of the Sermon in Stone. I spied Father Don Leiphon going into the Sacristy, started asking him some fool questions, and he was kind enough to get out the baptismal registers so we could check dates. They revealed that Father Bierens was baptizing babies here from July 1925 to April 1942.

Father Leiphon said to talk to Claire Hermes about Father Bierens, and so I did. Mr. Hermes, it turns out, was an altar boy for Father Bierens for about the years 1932-38. Evidently the father had a regular corps of altar boys, always about a dozen, that he kept busy not only serving the mass but also helping out with his pet projects.

Hermes recalls Bierens took the gang over to a gravel pit at Hankinson to pick stones for the obelisks. He also set them to catching birds. As recorded in the WPA guide, the priest was a bird bander for the U.S. Biological Survey. He let the church grounds grow up in shrubs and brush and set bird traps all around. He was reported to have banded the first starling in North Dakota, in 1935. He had the boys bring fledglings from nests in the community for him to band before they flew away.

Evelyn Hermes, Claire's wife, wrote the parish history. In it she published a postcard photo showing that around the two surviving obelisks there used to be a dozen shorter ones--one for each of the twelve apostles. A subsequent priest didn't care for the aggregation, Mrs. Hermes says, and began its destruction, but as her husband notes, "there was enough rebellion that the two main monuments were left up."

The collection of stuff embedded in the concrete obelisks is amazing--stuff material, and stuff symbolic. The larger bears a date stone, "1932," and credits Father Bierens as designer and Chris Krump as the mason who constructed the works. Into the concrete he pressed petrified wood, Montana agate, rose quartz, red quartzite and other glacial stone, pieces of marble, stone ax heads and mauls, pipes of pipestone, various fossils, colored marbles, and other minerals unknown to me. Atop the lesser obelisks sits a cannonball boulder ringed with marbles.

Religious motifs represented in various fashions included the Ten Commandments, ship anchors, a red heart, crosses, keys, and the Alpha and the Omega.

What's going on in the minds of the wonderful eccentrics who create monuments such as these? Who really knows? What I read into the Sermon in Stone, however, is a message of triumphal Christendom. These monuments say that there are fossils, yes, and they seem to contradict the Bible; there are Indian faiths and cultures of antiquity; there are minerals that say geologically the world is much older than the Old Testament; and yet, the God of Father Bierens subsumes and comprehends them all.

The message of the Sermon in Stone is not a politically correct one, but I'm not worrying about that right now. I'm just marveling at what God or someone has wrought in Fairmount, N.D.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, tom@plainsfolk.com 
Editor: Gary Moran, (701) 231-7865, gmoran@ndsuext.nodak.edu 

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