The Church of St. Columba in St. Paul’s Hamline-Midway neighborhood is the only Minnesota work by the Chicago architect Francis Barry Byrne. Architectural historian and critic Larry Millett calls it “a high point of modern church architecture in the Twin Cities.”

South Dakota Hutterite families with roots in the Anabaptist Reformation of the sixteenth-century moved to Cottonwood County in 1994. There, they established the Neuhof Hutterian Brethren Colony and the Elmendorf Hutterian Brethren Colony south of Mountain Lake, Minnesota.

The European immigrants who moved into southwestern Minnesota in the mid-1800s brought their religious faiths with them. The founders of Immanuel Baptist Church in Westbrook (Cottonwood County) moved into the first church building erected in the village after the members of that original congregation moved on to other areas, leaving the building vacant.