Assumption Chapel

Assumption Chapel, also known as the Grasshopper Chapel, is a Roman Catholic Marian shrine, "Calvary Hill" (German: Kalvarienberg), and pilgrimage chapel (German: Wallfahrtsort) (German: Gnadenkapelle). The shrine stands upon one of the tallest hills in Stearns County, and which is known locally as (German: Marienberg), meaning "Mary's Mountain", on the outskirts of Cold Spring, Minnesota. The chapel stands in a region of Minnesota largely settled in the 1850s by German-American Catholics who were invited to the area by Slovenian-American missionary Fr. Francis Xavier Pierz and which remained, until shortly before the Second World War, a major center for the speaking of the German language in the United States. Although inspired by thousand-year-old traditions carried from Southern Germany to central Minnesota by its peasant-pioneers, the Assumption Chapel, similar to the St. Boniface pilgrimage shrine in nearby St. Augusta, was constructed in 1877, as a desperate plea for heavenly intercession against the Rocky Mountain locusts; a species of giant grasshopper whose plagues devastated the region between 1856 and 1877. As many local peasant pioneers had emigrated from regions of southern Germany that had been evangelized by Hiberno-Scottish missionaries from the Celtic Church, customs associated with both shrines bear close similarities to traditional Breton pardons or to the pattern days of Gaelic Ireland. The petition was considered to have been successful at the time and there has not been another Rocky Mountain locust plague in Minnesota since 1877. Moreover, the last documented sighting of live Rocky Mountain locusts in the wild took place in southern Canada in 1902. In 2014, the species of insects which was once numerous enough to block out the sunlight and reduce farm families throughout North America to starvation was formally declared extinct by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Writing in 1997, Jewish-American historian of America's religious architecture Marilyn J. Chiat described the early history of the region as follows, "Father Francis X. Pierz, a missionary to Indians in central Minnesota, published a series of articles in 1851 in German Catholic newspapers advocating Catholic settlement in central Minnesota. Large numbers of immigrants, mainly German, but also Slovenian and Polish, responded. Over 20 parishes where formed in what is now Stearns County, each centered on a church-oriented hamlet. As the farmers prospered, the small frame churches were replaced by more substantial buildings of brick or stone such as St. Mary, Help of Christians, a Gothic Revival stone structure built in 1873. Stearns County retains in its German character and is still home to one of the largest rural Catholic populations in Anglo-America."

Furthermore, according to Kathleen Neils Conzen, "Stearns County Germans early established daughter settlements at West Union in Todd County, Millerville in Douglas County, and Pierz in Morrison County, later flooded into North Dakota (where 'Stearns County German' remains a recognized ethnicity today), and in 1905 negotiated with the Canadian authorities to establish the St. Peter Colony in north-central Saskatchewan." The first Assumption Chapel was known as (German: Maria-Hilf), meaning "Mary, Help of Christians", and was built atop the same hill, which is locally known as (German: Marienberg), meaning "Mary's Mountain". At the time of its original construction in 1877, much of the Midwest was suffering from a four year long Rocky Mountain locust plague. At the same time, however, the construction of the chapel was based on a tradition stretching back much earlier.

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