Legacies of Faith: The Catholic Churches of Stearns County

Stearns County, Minnesota, contains a generous sprinkling of small communities with handsome Catholic churches. Most of these towns were formed as, and still are, predominately Catholic settlements. No county in Minnesota, or even in the United States, compares in density of Catholic hamlets to Stearns County. With a population approximately two-thirds Catholic, this county contains fifty Catholic churches, the majority of which were built between 1871 and 1930. This is the story of those churches and the people and times that built them.