Original Site of New Home Lutheran Church

The Mitchell congregation that left this hill in 1958 has listed a Santa Lucia program each December among its traditions, a custom younger in its public form than the church itself. The white-gowned Lucia with candles in her hair began around Lake Vänern in the late eighteenth century and spread slowly through the nineteenth. It became a national event only in 1927, when a Stockholm newspaper sponsored a contest to choose a Lucia, and the first modern celebration at Skansen followed in 1928. The settlers who organized Nyhem in 1883 had left Sweden long before.

What the plaque says

Original Site of New Home Lutheran Church During the early 1880's, a small group of Swedish settlers left their home- land to come to Dakota Territory where they took up homesteads in this vicinity. On September 15, 1883, after holding services and meetings in their homes, they organized "The Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Nyhem Church" -- Nyhem being the Swedish word for new home -- because they wanted a new church home in their new land. The charter members were: Mr. and Mrs. P. E. Anderson; Mr. and Mrs. Nels Anderson; Mr. and Mrs. Gustaf A. Johnson; Mr. and Mrs. August Carlson; Mr. and Mrs. A. Lindstrom; Mr. and Mrs. H. B. Anderson; Mr. and Mrs. J. P. Lindahl; Mr. and Mrs. Charley Wilson; Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Carlson; Mr. and Mrs. Frank G. Sand; Carl Honasson; Gustaf Sandstrom; J. P. Carlson; Carl Tornquist; Mr. and Mrs. John P. Carlson; Mr. and Mrs. G. A. Carlson; Mr. and Mrs. John Peterson; Mr. and Mrs. Sven G. Strand; Nels Rosenquist; and Hultin Rosenquist. Services were held in homes and a schoolhouse until 1885 when P. E. Anderson offered five acres of land for a church and cemetery. A small frame church was built later that year, to which a bell tower and improvements were added over the years. Due to a declining rural population, the membership decided to relocate the church in nearby Mitchell. So on August 24, 1958, the last worship service was held. Only the bell remains of the sturdy white church which stood on this hill for three quarters of a century defying all the elements -- a symbol of the stalwart faith of those whose loving hands had placed it here. This historical marker has been provided as a memorial to Clarence A. Carlson and Alvin Tilberg

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Corn Palace — 8.3 mi
  The last survivor of more than thirty corn palaces built across the Midwest, a basketball arena with domes by a Chicago theater firm, covered every year in new murals of corn.
• Mitchell Prehistoric Indian Village — 10 mi
  A fortified farming village of about seventy earth lodges above Firesteel Creek a thousand years ago, ancestral to the Mandan, still being excavated under a dome.

More markers nearby

• Indian Medicine Tree — 7.1 mi
• Old Mill Stone — 7.9 mi
• Firesteel — 8.1 mi
• Carl Gunderson: 11th Governor of South Dakota — 8.3 mi