Oddsconsin...where we explore peculiar and sometimes mysterious features of Wisconsin’s human landscape.
St. Mary of the Oaks is a tiny chapel that sits on the crest of a hill in northwest Dane County, overlooking Indian Lake 200 feet below. The chapel, less than 10 feet on a side, was built in 1857. Today the property is owned by Dane County and is part of Indian Lake County Park. The hilltop is covered in old growth Oak-Hickory forest over 100 years old, and probably looks much like it did when the chapel was constructed almost 170 years ago.
St. Mary of the Oaks was built by John Endres, a German immigrant, who owned the property. The original land patent shows that Endres purchased 80 acres - the northern half of the northwest quarter of Section 12, Township 8 North, Range 7 East - on November 10, 1855, at the Land Office in Mineral Point. This means Endres and his family were the first European settlers on this parcel of land. Endres’ neighbors were also new to the area, having purchased their land only a few years earlier.
To build the chapel, Endres and his sons hauled tons of local stone to the location with an ox team. A marker next the chapel states that its construction reflects German building methods, including the scored mortar on the face of the building and the curved apse at the rear. The chapel’s original wood shingle roof was replaced with a metal one in the 1920s.
Hilltop chapels were common in Germany and other parts of Europe in the 19th century. In Wisconsin, Belgian immigrants built many roadside chapels in Door County, some of which are still in existence today. These chapels solved the practical problem of providing a place for prayer when churches were sparse and hard to get to. But there were sometimes other motives behind their construction. Some were built out of gratitude for surviving a serious accident, or when children were born healthy. And some were built to figures like St. Roch, a saint invoked during pandemics and plagues.
Endres apparently built St. Mary of the Oaks to show his gratitude for his family surviving a diphtheria epidemic. Diphtheria is a bacterial infection affecting the respiratory system. It causes a membrane to form over the throat, leading to suffocation. It particularly affects the young. Until a vaccine was developed in the early 1920s, diphtheria took the lives of thousands of children in the US, including those of Presidents Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield and Grover Cleveland.
The brutal reality of life in rural Wisconsin in the 19th century is depicted in Michael Lesy’s remarkable book, Wisconsin Death Trip. Drawing on newspaper articles and photographs from Jackson County, Lesy shows how diseases like diphtheria not only decimated families and communities, but “inverted a natural order” by killing the children before their parents, inducing feelings of despair and hopelessness alongside grief. This explains, Levy says, the stories of parents who poisoned their children or drowned them, rather than watch them die of an infectious disease.
It’s no wonder, then, that Endres chose such a quiet, peaceful location for St. Mary of the Oaks -- a place to forget the hardships of pioneer life and reflect on what he and his family could be thankful for.