Coon Prairie Lutheran Church, Westby, WI

Coon Prairie Lutheran Church
in the country

where the ancestors are buried

 Coon Prairie Lutheran Church
in town

"Coon Prairie Lutheran Church was established on July 12, 1852, just four years after Norwegian settlers entered the Westby area. The congregation received its first pastor in 1855 and dedicated its first wooden building in 1857. Coon Prairie’s pastors served as many as 11 congregations throughout the region for many years. During the pastorate of Halvor Halvorsen (1872-1921), a fine stone building was erected which burned to the ground on Easter Sunday, 1909. Congregation members could not agree on a new building site and two identical edifices were built at $22,500 each: Country Coon Prairie on the original site and Westby Coon Prairie in the thriving new town. Coon Prairie was an important member of the Norwegian Lutheran Synod and experienced the theological divisions over predestination which rocked that church body in the 1880s. In 1917 it joined 92 percent of Norwegian Lutherans in the United States in forming the Norwegian Lutheran Church in America and is currently part of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America." 

 - From Westby, Wisconsin Remembered blog, by Eric Leum, Mr. C.'s cousin. In memory. Today would have been his 70th birthday.

 

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"Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in springtime." - Martin Luther
 

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Have a blessed Lord's Day,