Greenfield Lutheran Church

Harmony’s Greenfield Lutheran Church traces its history to 1856, when Norwegian immigrant families began holding religious services in the settler-colonist community of Greenfield Prairie. In 1913, a brick church was built a half mile to the north in Harmony. It became the congregation’s permanent home and one of the city’s most beautiful architectural landmarks.

Construction of the first Lutheran church in Greenfield Prairie began in 1866, shortly after Reverend Tobias Larsen was hired as the congregation’s permanent pastor. Until Larsen’s hire, pastors traveling on horseback served the congregation every four weeks. Religious services lasted up to three hours, and some settler-colonists traveled up to eight miles to attend.

The church was not completed until 1874; poor weather conditions and delayed delivery of building materials were to blame. Workers created the brick exterior from local clay heated in a kiln on a nearby farm. The resulting building was forty-eight feet long, thirty-six feet wide, and eighteen feet high. It boasted a steeple that ascended seventy-five feet into the sky. A parsonage was also built on a forty-acre farm east of the church.

In 1884, the Greenfield Lutheran Congregation hired the Norwegian American artist Herbjorn Gausta to create an altar painting. The resulting work, “Christ’s Resurrection,” was placed at the front of the sanctuary. In 1886, the congregation purchased an organ; in 1887, pastors delivered sermons in both Norwegian and English for the first time.

Greenfield Lutheran congregants built a small chapel in Harmony in 1901 to give themselves a place to gather outside Greenfield Prairie. By then, the town had become a thriving community due to the arrival of the Milwaukee Road railway in the autumn of 1879. Greenfield Prairie’s business owners had moved to Harmony to be closer to the rail line, and a majority of the church’s congregation lived there. The chapel, built on donated land, had a kitchen and a large room used for church meetings, services, social events, and Sunday school. A parsonage was also built in Harmony in 1905.

The congregation decided to build a larger place of worship in Harmony in 1912. The cornerstone was laid on September 29, 1912, and the new church was dedicated on September 21, 1913. The much larger church replaced the church in Greenfield as well as the Harmony chapel, which was sold, moved to a different location in town, and used as a private home.

Church parishioners contributed money for the purchase of large stained-glass windows, a pipe organ, interior decorations, and other items. One church member donated the altar painting, titled “Christ as the Good Shepherd”—another Gausta creation.

The church had a full basement and kitchen. The building was described in the church’s 100th anniversary booklet as “of Gothic architecture and adorned with two well proportioned steeples, the highest capped with a gold cross, reaching one hundred feet above the ground. It is built of pressed brick and the arches being cut of Bedford stone.” Forty-eight years later, a large addition was built that included administrative offices, several Sunday school classrooms, a small chapel, and a library.

In 1919, the church in Greenfield Prairie was demolished and the original Gausta painting was given to the Lutheran church in Fremont, Minnesota. When the Fremont church closed, the painting was donated to the Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum in Decorah, Iowa.

In 1921, the Harmony congregation erected a memorial to the founders of Greenfield Lutheran Church. It was placed in the church’s cemetery at Harmony’s south entrance, where the original church had stood. The seven-foot-high granite memorial lists eighty-five founders, and an inscription on a bronze tablet states: “On this site stood the first church of the Norwegian Evangelical Lutheran Congregation of Greenfield, Fillmore County, Minnesota.”