Imagine that it’s the early 1900s and you just relocated to this area from somewhere back East. You’re working to settle your homestead and occasionally feel homesick or isolated by the vast landscape around you. Where might you go to build a sense of community or practice traditions that make you feel closer to home? For many, this would have been the local church. In rural communities, a church might serve as more than just a house of worship, but also as a meeting house, a place to gather in times of celebration, a place to provide stability in times of crisis, or just a place to spend time with your friends and neighbors. The Pioneer Church here at Heritage Park was built in 1907 to the northwest of Garrison and would have certainly served these purposes and more for the early settlers of this area.

Known back then as St. Paul’s Lutheran, the church was originally 10 miles outside of Garrison in the rural community of Douglas, North Dakota. Many settlers in the Midwest and Northern Plains, having Germanic or Scandinavian backgrounds, would have grown up attending Lutheran services. St. Paul’s was particularly established for Missouri Synod Lutherans, a branch of the Lutheran Church organized in 1847 in Chicago by German immigrants. Garrison’s Lutheran Missouri Synod Church, called Bethlehem, wasn’t built until 1915, but after a few decades these two churches would combine to form Peace Lutheran Church of Garrison, and the old St. Paul’s church would be abandoned.

When the Heritage Park Foundation saw another chance to save a historical building from obscurity, they purchased the old church from Peace Lutheran for five hundred dollars, and in 1976, St. Paul’s was moved to Heritage Park and became the Pioneer Church. Containing historical items not only from St. Paul’s, but also Bethlehem and other historic churches in the area, the Pioneer Church has become a sort of proxy museum for the early 20th century frontier church experience. Some of the interesting items inside include ornate candle holders and a crucifix original to St. Paul’s, a portable pump organ that was purchased by Bethlehem Church in the 1940s to be used for services during the construction of the Garrison Dam, as well as a full size pump organ formerly used in another local church, Mt. Zion Presbyterian. Heritage Park has kept the church in usable condition and several times it has even been used for special services. So it seems that still to this day, while the Pioneer Church may sometimes function as a house of worship, it also serves another purpose - preserving the history of those who worked to cultivate a community in a new place.