VOLGA – A beautiful baptismal font that once graced the thriving Oslo Lutheran Church has been given to the Brookings County Museum.

It will be on display at the museum when it opens for the summer months at 1 p.m. Sunday, May 30.

Until Labor Day, the museum will be open from 1 to 4 p.m. seven days a week. Admission is free. 

For nearly a decade Oslo Lutheran was a quintessential rural church serving Scandinavian pioneer farmers who in the 1880s settled in Oslo Township south of Volga and east of Sinai. 

It was founded in 1888 by 11 families, including Tollef Hammerness, John Hjelle, Ole Westrum, Carl Dahle, Pete Pederson, Ole Stumley, Martin Sterud, John Magistad, Isak Tvedt, J.E. Lerum and John Larson. 

N. Brandt served the congregation as its first pastor, meeting with the members just once each month until June l889. The church then hired Markus Svaren, who would travel the area serving Oslo and six other area congregations.

For several years the founding families and others who later joined took turns holding services in their homes. They then met in a schoolhouse that was converted into a small church on land near the H.C. Hellekson farm. 

In 1891 Ole Westrum donated land for a church and the converted schoolhouse was taken down and moved to the Westrum land where it was rebuilt into a church. 

About 20 years later, the Westrum brothers sold a plot adjoining the church that became a cemetery. 

Services were first held in the new building in 1893. Cost paid to contractor John Swenson of Lake County for rebuilding it was $1,200.

By 1907 the carpentry talents of farmers/parishioners John Lund and Carl Pederson were called to service. 

They built an altar and the baptismal font that will now be displayed for the first time in the museum when it opens on May 30. 

The font stands 53 inches high. It’s hexagonal in shape, and its six sides fit together almost seamlessly, indicating the talent and attention to detail Lund and Pederson had for woodworking. Their beautiful work was long before power tools came along. 

The font’s basin, in which consecrated water was placed, is a simple, unadorned, white enameled pan that in the early 1900s when the font was fabricated could have been purchased as a wash basin at any hardware store in Volga or Sinai for less than a dollar.   

The church and the farms surrounding the Oslo church thrived for a nearly a century, thanks to the hard work and farming knowledge of those who worked the fertile fields. The remarkable and dramatic advancement in farm equipment that began in the 1930s gradually replaced horse drawn equipment.

Ironically, as it was with so many rural churches, these technological advances in agriculture meant farm families could operate larger farms. Church membership started to decline. 

With membership ebbing, the Oslo Lutheran Church was disbanded in 1982 with most of the members seeking solace at Our Savior Lutheran Church in Brookings. During its active use, the baptismal font was the focal point for more than 250 ceremonies.

One of those baptized at the Oslo Church was Blaine Hoff, a retired Volga banker who is now the volunteer Oslo Cemetery caretaker. Hoff recently gave the font to the museum on behalf of all former Oslo Lutheran parishioners.

He had been baptized at the font on a cold Christmas Eve in 1944. 

That historic Oslo font, now in its 115th year, is a simple but beautiful example of one of the most important sacred icons in the Christian Church, and now becomes a permanent reminder of Brookings County’s rural church history.

Sturdy structure survived tornado   

Twenty years after the Oslo Church was closed in 1982, a tornado roared through the area. Swooping over the church building caused only slight damage by nudging the old building slightly off its cement foundation. 

However, the July 2002 storm did down many old trees on the church property, and several grave markers in the adjacent cemetery were damaged.