"All God's Materials"
The Dickeyville Grotto, Religion, and Roadside Attractions
The landscape of the Driftless. Photograph by author, 2017.
The Driftless Area of southwestern Wisconsin is a rural region populated with villages and dairy farms. Its name is a nod to the topography: the region's rolling hills were spared the glacial drift that flattened the surrounding Midwestern countryside. Country highways climb to the top of ridges before plunging back down into the next valley [1]. This bucolic landscape of hills, fields, and farmhouses is home to a remarkable creation built by a priest in the early twentieth century: the Holy Ghost Park, commonly known as the Dickeyville Grotto.
The Dickyville Grotto fuses two seemingly incongruous types of cultural sites: the grotto, an ancient sacred space tradition that has been part of Catholic pilgrimage routes for centuries, and the roadside attraction, which emerged in tandem with the modern practice of automobile tourism in the twentieth century. This Story Map explores the ornamentation of the Dickeyville Grotto. It makes the argument that the selection of decorative materials was not merely aesthetic: rather, Father Wernerus used ornamentation on his grottos to assert that his parish was modern, patriotic, and American.
Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes in Cleator, England (L) and Lourdes, France (R)
Despite its unique qualities, the Dickeyville Grotto is an expression of an ancient tradition. The word "grotto" describes a cave used by humans, often for spiritual purposes. In ancient Greece grottoes were used as important sacred sites, practice that was extended by Christianity, which associates grottoes with the symbolism of birth and the Virgin Mary [2].
Drawing of a grotto in the garden of British poet Alexander Pope. For a full citation of an article on this grotto see footnote 2.
By the 1600s artificial grottoes also started to become a part of garden designs in Europe, a practice that spread to the United States. Thomas Jefferson even built a grotto in the garden at his plantation Monticello [3].
In the early twentieth century Catholic priests from Western Europe immigrated to the Upper Midwest to serve at newly-formed congregations. These priests brought the grotto-building traditions of their home countries with them, constructing grotto structures alongside churches, nunneries, and as part of civic memorials. In the Midwestern landscape where caves were scarce they used concrete to build the grottoes and ornamented them with materials like shell and stone. As these sites started to proliferate everyday individuals were also inspired to build grottoes in their backyards. The map below shows some of these early-twentieth century grottos; click the pins for photographs and more information.
Books like Lisa Stone and Jim Zanzi's Sacred Spaces and Other Places: A Guide to the Grottos and Sculptural Environments of the Upper Midwest examine how these sites translate the grotto tradition into new visual forms [4]. This Story Map extends Stone and Zanzi's scholarship with a focus on the way that the twentieth-century Midwestern grottos are not only expressions of folk tradition, but also of the Midwest's embeddedness in networks of modern life.
The small village of Dickeyville Wisconsin was founded in 1849 by Charles and Louisa Dickey, who opened a dry goods store at the intersection of several major travel routes. Dickeyville grew steadily over the next seventy years, and by 1920 it had several hundred residents. Most were born in Wisconsin, nearly all were white and of German or Dutch heritage and worked as farmers [5]. Many residents practiced Catholicism at the Holy Ghost church in town, which was founded in 1892. In 1918 German immigrant Father Mathias Wernerus arrived to serve as priest for the Dickeyville congregation [6].
This timeline of construction is drawn from Susan Niles's book The Dickeyville Grotto: The Vision of Father Mathias Wernerus [7].
Father Wernerus’s motivations for undertaking the ambitious building project are not entirely clear. According to his own account his inspiration was a statue of the Virgin Mary donated by a thankful parishioner. In addition, Father Wernerus was also almost certainly aware of the grotto-building practices of Father Paul Dobberstein, another German-born Midwestern priest. In 1912 Father Dobberstein began to create a massive grotto out of ornamented concrete on the grounds of his parish in West Bend, Iowa. He built a number of other churchyard grottos and civic memorials across the Upper Midwest, as visible in the map above. The similarities between the two men’s practices attest to the likelihood that Father Wernerus saw Father Dobberstein’s work, or at least read the celebratory coverage of it in the local, popular, and Catholic press.
Comparison showing the Dickeyville Grotto on the left and the Grotto of the Redemption on the right
Father Wernerus may also have been motivated to capitalize on growing opportunities for tourism in the region. In 1926 the federal government passed an act to systematize national highways, and Dickeyville was located at the crux of two newly-numbered routes—highways 61 and 118 (now US-151). Father Wernerus built the Grotto of Christ the King and Mary, His Mother so that it was close to the highway and all those who traveled along it. He also threw a large and well-advertised dedication celebration in September of 1930. Newspaper articles announced Father Wernerus’s invitation for Protestants and Catholics alike to attend the dedication, where the Governor of Wisconsin was a featured speaker.
Image from historic postcard collection at the the Dickeyville Grotto Gift Shop, dated September 14, 1930.
On the day of the event, Governor Kohler praised the Dickeyville Grotto as a contribution to the “betterment of all mankind” in front of a crowd of an estimated ten to fifteen thousand people from twenty-two states [8]. Informational booklets and picture postcards were available for purchase at the site.
Father Wernerus’s approach to the Dickeyville Grotto’s dedication reflects his desire that his creation reach audiences far beyond the local community or even fellow Catholics; he wrote in a booklet that it was built for “God and Country” [9]. Father Wernerus signaled this national audience with the grotto's patriotic symbolism; the papal and national flags flank the Grotto of Christ and His Mother, Mary. Moreover, the shine devoted to patriotism features statues of Christopher Columbus, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln, and other patriotic imagery. This sets the Dickeyville Grotto apart from the Grotto of the Redemption, which only contains religious imagery.
The national imagery at the Dickeyville Grotto asserts the patriotism of Catholics, and German Catholics in particular at a moment when both communities were seen as suspicious, and even potentially traitorous. Father Wernerus’s first building project was a memorial to local soldiers killed in World War I, a war fought against his home country of Germany. Further, in the early twentieth century anti-Catholic sentiment was widespread as Catholics were seen as having primary loyalty to the pope [10]. In this period, movements to increase American tourism framed it as a patriotic duty, urging people to “See America First” as a ritual of citizenship that diverted tourist dollars to the national economy [11]. Therefore, Father Wernerus’s creation of a roadside attraction for “God and county” situates the German Catholic congregants at the Holy Ghost Church as active, patriotic participants in the modern American nation.
The Dickeyville Grotto made this argument not only through symbolism, but also with the ornaments displayed on the surfaces of the Dickeyville Grotto.
Photo by Carl Wycoff, https://www.flickr.com/photos/80909625@N00/19862566212.
As discussed above, Father Wernerus was likely directly inspired by the Grotto of the Redemption and other sites Father Dobberstein built. Father Dobberstein advertised the fact that the stones, gems, stalactites, and other materials that decorated his grotto were gathered from all over the country. However, Father Dobberstein openly refused to use “common materials” like household glass and china on his grottos in order to create the impression that they had organically grown from nature [12].
Father Wernerus also emphasized the geographical breadth of the ornaments at the Dickeyville Grotto, but he chose to integrate a wide range of materials. Although he didn't keep detailed records on his construction process, he wrote informational booklets about the Dickeyville Grotto that proudly feature extensive lists detailing the many ornamental objects and their origins [13]. The map below allows you to explore the materials that traveled to Dickeyville to ornament the grotto. Note: this map will continue to be updated over time.
As this map of materials shows, the Dickeyville Grotto serves as a wide-ranging collection of materials from faraway places, displayed in a small town that was referred to by the press as an “unknown place," and a “tiny hamlet.” Dickeyville was not located on a railroad line or a harbor, but its location on an emerging interstate highway system enabled both the flow of visitors and the transportation of building materials, most of which came by truck.
Newspaper article, source unknown, scanned from a scrapbook in the Dickeyville Grotto Gift Shop collection.
The popular press depicted Father Wernerus as a modern consumer skilled in navigating global systems of exchange. His purchasing process is explained in a lengthy anecdote in a local newspaper. Salespeople would come to Dickeyville with samples from “every country in the world.” If a sample caught his eye, Wernerus would keep it and ask the goods to be shipped to the nearby town of Potosi, where he would inspect them. If he was satisfied, he would send his trucks to retrieve the materials, but if he was not, they were returned—at the salesperson’s expense [14].
Another article heralds Father Wernerus’s acumen in selecting, purchasing, and arranging materials: “One feels like Alice in Wonderland as one wanders about…marveling at…the artisan’s skill in assembling his materials to produce such glowing color and unique forms, and the magical way that waste stuff has been made to blossom into an iridescent spectacle that draws thousands” [15]. In other words, Father Wernerus’s skill lay not only in his procurement of what he called “all God’s materials,” but also in his ability to create a unified whole that integrates the ancient, natural, valuable, and exotic with the modern, mass produced, everyday, and discarded.
Photo by author, September 2017.
These abilities made Father Wernerus into, as another article puts it, “a ‘clerical hustler’” who “made his congregation one of the most famous in the central states” [16]. While the term “hustler” is a dubious compliment, it reflects the perception that Father Wernerus savvily navigated the tourist business to benefit his congregation. And Wernerus was certainly successful in this regard; for decades the grotto drew tens of thousands of visitors each year. Local newspapers printed road trip itineraries, and they provide insight into the journeys of some of these pilgrims, who experienced the grotto on trips that included visits to nearby natural sites like the Crystal Cave in Iowa or historic locations like Tower Hill in Wisconsin. You can read a few of the itineraries below.
These tourists likely experienced the Dickeyville Grotto not only as an extension of older religious traditions, but also as a testament to modern American resourcefulness—the capacity to collect materials from around the globe and assemble them into a pleasing and novel form.
Photograph by Seymour Rosen, (c) SPACES, http://spacesarchives.org/explore/search-the-online-collection/watts-towers/
Unfortunately, Father Wernerus did not get to fully experience the fruits of his labor. He fell ill and passed away on February 10, 1931, less than a year after the Dickeyville Grotto's dedication. Yet the Dickeyville Grotto had an afterlife in the making practices of others, who were inspired to apply Father Wernerus's ingenuity to their own creations. In 1929 Paul and Matilda Wegner visited the Dickeyville Grotto and were moved to construct a grotto in their Wisconsin backyard; similarly, Nick Englehart built Grandview Statue Garden in his yard in the 1930s after an inspirational trip to Dickeyville.
Furthermore, souvenirs circulated the image of the grotto widely, likely inspiring sites across the country and the globe. For example, Sam (Sabato) Rodia, the builder of the Watts Towers in Los Angeles, California (ca. 1921-1954), had a postcard of the Dickeyville Grotto on his wall and even claimed to have helped build the site [17].
The Platteville Journal from September 1930.
The creation of the Dickeyville Grotto tells a story about how Catholic material culture like grottos persisted into the twentieth century. Yet the Dickeyville Grotto's ornamentation also shows how one priest used creative placemaking to position his parish, and the rural landscape of the Driftless, as a generative site of interconnection in the modernizing nation. Father Wernerus’s acquisition of a diverse array of materials positioned him as modern citizen-consumer and made the grotto an attraction for the touristic consumers attracted by its ingenuity. Further, the grotto both depended on and contributed to the development and use of modern infrastructure that swiftly transported materials and bodies to far-flung locales. The history of the Dickeyville Grotto therefore reveals how a builder priest combined religious building traditions with the roadside attraction to make an argument for his German Catholic congregation’s identity as modern patriotic Americans.
Thank you for reading this Story Map. Please contact Dr. Emma Silverman at silverman.emma@gmail.com with questions and comments.
1. For more on the history of the Driftless region see Keefe Keeley and Curt Meine, editors, The Driftless Reader (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2017).
2. For a history of the grotto form see Naomi Miller, Heavenly Caves: Reflections on the Garden Grotto (New York: George Braziller, 1982).
3. For more on the drawings of Alexander Pope’s grottos see J. Vanessa Lyon, “‘A Relic from the Cave of Pope’: Drawings of the Grotto in an Extra-Illustrated Plan of Mr. Pope’s Garden in the Huntington Library,” Huntington Library Quarterly 78, no. 3 (Autumn 2015): 441–477. For the fact about Thomas Jefferson’s grotto see “Grotto,” History of Early American Landscape Design: A Project of the Center for the Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Website, Accessed June 11, 2021, https://heald.nga.gov/mediawiki/index.php/Grotto.
4. See Lisa Stone and Jim Zanzi, Sacred Spaces and Other Places: A Guide to Grottos and Sculptural Environments in the Upper Midwest (Chicago, IL: The School of the Art Institute of Chicago Press, 1993).
5. These demographics are based on census data of the Paris township. Dickeyville was incorporated in 1947. The town name was initially Dickeysville, but the s was dropped in 1932.
6. Commemorating a Century of Growth in Holy Ghost Parish, Dickeyville, Wisconsin, 1873-1973 (Dickeyville, WI: Holy Ghost Parish), 1973
7. See Susan A. Niles, Dickeyville Grotto: The Vision of Father Mathias Wernerus (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1997).
8. “Governor Ends Drive Over Radio,” Wisconsin State Journal, September 15, 1930, and “Grotto Rites at Dickeyville,” Cuba City News Herald, September [date indiscernible], 1930.
9. Reverend Mathias Wernerus, The Grotto (Dickeyville, WI: Holy Ghost Parish, n.d.).
10. See Susannah K. Koerber, “Chapter 5: Father Mathias Wernerus and Holy Ghost Park” in Signs of the Times: Context and connection in Southern conservative evangelical Protestant and Midwestern Roman Catholic grassroots art environments (PhD Diss., Emory University, 2004), especially 199–215.
11. The “See America First” campaign was inaugurated in 1906 and funded by Western boosters. Marguerite S. Schaffer argues that the development of the modern nation state was intertwined with this touristic journey for American identity in See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880–1940 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2001).
12. For a discussion of Dobberstein’s use of materials see Lisa Stone, Jim Zanzi, and Earl Iverse, “In Imitation of Nature: Father P.M. Dobberstein’s Grottoes in Iowa and Wisconsin,” in Backyard Visionaries: Grassroots Art in the Midwest, eds. Barbara Brackman and Cathy Dwigans (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1999), 55.
13. See Reverend Mathias Wernerus, The Grotto and The Grottos at Dickeyville (Dickeyville, WI: self-published, n.d.).
14. [Title unknown], Platteville Journal, October 18, 1939.
15. “The Dickeyville Grotto,” The Beloit Daily News, Oct. 8, 1930.
16. “‘Patriotism’ Is the Latest Shrine Built by Priest,” unknown paper from the Dickeyville Grotto archives.
17. The Dickeyville Grotto postcard is visible hanging on Rodia’s wall in the documentary The Towers by William Hale (and Ray Wisniewski, uncredited). The documentary was originally released in 1957 and can be viewed in a recently remastered version here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9L3hlXe3-Uc. Rodia’s conversation with the filmmakers, including his claim to have helped build the Dickeyville Grotto, is re-printed in Appendix A.2 of Sabato Rodia’s Towers in Watts: Art, Migrations, Development, ed. Luisa del Giudice (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 359. Unfortunately, the original recording of this conversation has been lost. For more information about the relationship between the Dickeyville Grotto and the Watts Towers see my forthcoming book Watts Towers Rising: The Racial Politics of an Outsider Monument.