First Site of Bethel Lutheran Church and Cemetery

Bethel's congregation moved into Holdrege in 1884, and by 1921 it could build a large masonry church there. The state's 1991 historic buildings survey of Phelps County picked that church out as a noteworthy example of the big churches prosperous congregations raised in the 1920s, and judged its later north and east additions sympathetic. The same survey recorded this cemetery as a site of its own, dated about 1880 and 1929. Its overview gives the scale behind both: in 1890 Swedes were the county's largest foreign-born group, 24 percent of all residents, and still almost 14 percent in 1920.

What the plaque says

1877 Dedicated 1929 To the pioneers who here erected the first sanctuary of the Bethel Lutheran Church a sod structure completed June 1879 First Site of Bethel Lutheran Church and Cemetery June 1879 Thirty Swedish settlers in Harlan and Phelps counties organized Bethel Lutheran Church on November 12, 1877, at the home and post office of Gustaf Hanson, which was located seven miles south and two miles east of Holdrege in Harlan County. Their first church, a small sod structure, was built here in Phelps County on a plot of ground in the N.W. quarter of Section 31, Divide Precinct, donated by Mathias Hedlund. A cemetery located south of the church was receiving graves as late as 1932. The native prairie grass serves as a reminder of the past. Lay pastors serving the congregation were Olof Hedlund and C.J. Johnson. Pastor J.E. Swanbom was the first called pastor. The sod church was replaced in 1884 by a frame church built in Holdrege. In 1892, a frame building was erected at this site to be used during the summer months as a "Swede School" for the children of the congregation. The present congregation recognizes with thank- fulness the commitment and sacrifice these early pioneers made to affirm their Christian faith. Bethel Evangelical Lutheran Church Congregation Nebraska State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Kearny State Historical Park — 21 mi
  The 1848 army post on the Platte, built on a strip of Pawnee land bought for $2,000 in goods, where emigrant wagons passed by the thousand and only the cottonwoods outlasted the fort.
• Rowe Sanctuary — 27 mi
  Audubon's sanctuary on the Platte near Gibbon, where the river's sandbars are kept bare so that sandhill cranes, more than a million in the valley each spring, can roost safely at night.

More markers nearby

• Funk, Nebraska — 3.0 mi
• Site of Old Sacramento — 3.0 mi
• Phelps County — 3.5 mi
• Holdrege Silt Loam: The Nebraska State Soil — 4.1 mi