“An instinctive taste teaches men to build their churches in flat countries with spire steeples,
which, since they cannot be referred to as any other object, townspeople point as
with silent finger to the sky and stars.”
~Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Author, passage taken from ‘The Friend’
In the early 1870s Swedish immigrants began settling in Bryant township, Fillmore County, concentrating between the present towns of Shickley and Ong. As the settlement grew, these pioneers considered the need for a church, organized a congregation in 1875, and purchased six acres of land, although meetings were held in a schoolhouse and members’ homes until 1881, when the first church was built. In 1878 five acres were deeded to the Swedish Cemetery Association to provide a burial ground for the community.
By 1900 the old church was too small to accommodate the people who came to worship services and social events. The present church, a thirty-six by sixty foot frame structure with Gothic Revival detailing, was constructed in that year at a cost of $3,549. The congregation continued to use the Swedish language occasionally for worship until 1937. Stockholm Lutheran Church and Swedish Cemetery were entered in the National Register of Historic Places on June 30, 1995.
Stockholm Lutheran Church, two miles east of Shickley, NE
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