While this not the typical white rural church picture I normally would post on some Sundays, this church is still a rural church in a small village of less than 800 people in the farming community of Plain in southwestern Wisconsin.

It is actually the fifth Catholic church built in Plain after a cyclone in 1918 destroyed the the third church, leaving only the steeple.  The parishioners decided not to rebuild on the site where the first church was built in 1861 and the where the second and third church had also been built on, especially after a visiting priest made this comment on the old location, “A location, which even seemed to draw down the disapproval of God in destroying the third attempt to build in the poorest place in Plain – to erect a beautiful House of God in a hole surrounded by unsightly horse sheds.”

My great grandfather was one of the majority who voted yes to rebuild at a new location and so a combination church and school was built in 1919 on a new location and served as the fourth church until this fifth and current church was completed in 1940. On the left of the picture, a corner of the combination church and school building can be seen which still serves as the elementary and middle school now but also served as the high school in the past where my mom and her siblings attended.

St. Luke Catholic Church