| Additional Information: | A 'site file' (Salem Evangelical Church) exists for this property. It contains additional information such as correspondence, newspaper clippings, or historical information. It is a public record and may be viewed in person at the Wisconsin Historical Society, Division of Historic Preservation-Public History.
In the 1840s and 1850s, a group of twenty-two German-speaking Swiss immigrants from Canton Graubünden developed this rural community along the branches of Honey Creek, where they found a pastoral landscape of rolling farmland, wooded hills, and wetlands. Today, the historic district encompasses approximately twelve square miles and includes forty-six farmsteads.
The houses, barns, granaries, churches, and cemeteries evolved over three generations. A handful of the extant buildings date from the first generation: log homes subsequently covered with clapboard. Their children constructed their homes of dolomite, the local limestone with a warm yellow color. Six gabled-ell houses, built of dolomite between 1857 and 1884, display the skills of a John Peter Felix and Peter Kindschi, who had emigrated from Switzerland, and Caspar Steuber, who hailed from the Waldeck region, now central Germany. All three excelled in an unusual technique known as block-and-stack construction.
Scholars attribute the construction of the Salem Evangelical Church (also known as Ragatz Church or Salem United Methodist Church of Honey Creek) to all three men. Using yellow dolomite, they built this Gothic Revival church in the block-and-stack mode in 1875. At the center of the front-gabled facade rises a stone tower with a clapboard belfry and an octagonal spire, which replaced the original wooden steeple, destroyed by fire in 1904. Louvered Gothic openings pierce the belfry, their transoms embellished with a circle motif. This pattern echoes the tower’s Gothic-arched entry and stained-glass ocular light. Gothic windows, also filled with ornate stained glass, light the interior, which was remodeled in 1942. The residents of the Honey Creek settlement organized the Salem congregation with the help of German-speaking circuit-riding missionaries from the Pennsylvania-based Evangelical Church. German-language services were held here as late as 1933. |
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