Surrounded by Christ's sacrifice

Browerville’s Catholic identity has long extended beyond the church in the middle of Main Street. It can also be seen in the crucifix shrines that surround the town, which have been local landmarks for decades and are still cared for by community members.

“The crosses still stand by the highways and byways of Browerville, which means you can hardly get into Browerville without encountering one of these crucifixes,” said the Rev. Mitchell Bechtold, pastor of the One in Faith Catholic Community. “They are not just local landmarks; they are a sign of the character of the town.”

When Bechtold pastored Christ the King Catholic Church in Browerville and St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Clarissa, he spearheaded the move to digitize many of the church’s 2,000-plus historical photos and documents. In doing so, he and his team happened across many news articles and pictures about the roadside crosses; some of the information dated back to the parish’s earliest years.

In the Dec. 20, 1985, edition of the Todd County Country Courier, Tim King researched the history of the Browerville crucifix shrines in “Landmark shrines have history dating back to earliest homesteaders.” From what he found, the original roadside cross at the intersection of County Road 14 and 225th Avenue was likely built between 1875 and 1885, the time Browerville’s earliest settlers arrived in the area.

For a time, the area had two Catholic parishes — St. Joseph’s, now Christ the King, for those of Polish descent and St. Peter’s for the predominantly German — with a cemetery for each parish. In the early 1960s, a granite cross was set up at the boundary between these two cemeteries, and the wooden cross from the St. Joseph side was moved to the intersection of County Roads 11 and 14, while the corpus, a die-cast metal model of Christ’s body, was not added until 1967.

That cross also became a part of local Catholic devotion; on July 8, 1988, a group gathered at that cross to pray for relief from a Midwestern drought.
After a storm blew down the cross in July 1993 and broke the corpus, Brian Spandl, owner of Mill Lake Metal Finishing, and his father, Keith Spandl, used about 5 pounds of solder to repair the corpus, and Fred Becker built a new wooden cross for the site.

The Rev. Leonard Gaida, the pastor of St. Joseph’s in the 1960s and 1970s, oversaw the move of the cemetery cross; he had previously served Polish Catholic communities in Holdingford and Opole, and he noted similar shrines in those areas. Before he left Browerville in 1973, he blessed a third crucifix shrine, this one at the intersection of County Roads 21 and 20, and according to King, the priest also blessed a puppy that happened to be running by.

While the crucifixes have a long local history, Bechtold found an even deeper origin while reading about St. Charles Borromeo and his document “Instructiones Fabricae et Supellectilis Ecclesiasticae,” regarding the furnishing of Catholic churches after the decrees of the Council of Trent in 1563. The saint’s writings made prescriptions such as establishing the church building in a high, prominent place to protect it from floods or other disasters while also being visible to the community.

“In this document that largely summarized what this work was about, it talked about the traditions people would have; for example, when they would walk by a church, they would make the sign of the cross or would tip their hat,” Bechtold said.
“That was the same story I heard about these shrines. As people would drive by, they would make the sign of the cross as a reminder of God’s presence in their lives.”

Because the crosses date back to the time before the popularization of the automobile, they also served as a meeting point.

“When people got done with Mass, on their way home, they would supposedly stop there to rest and socialize because it would be at a crossroads,” Bechtold said. “There’s something about these crosses that speaks not only to something perennial, from age to age — for example, the image of the crucifix and how it reminds us there is no greater love than this, to lay down your life for your friends — … but it also speaks to the very specific time in which it was established, people walking to church (and) meeting on the crossroads instead of driving by each other.”

Bechtold realized Browerville had crosses roughly to the north and roughly west-southwest, but there was not one to the east. There was also the crucifix in front of Christ the King Church, and that seemed to be the natural central cross for Bechtold; therefore, he wanted to set up another cross, a fifth one, as an act of devotion,
faith and thanksgiving for the ways he believed God had blessed the Browerville community.

Tim Dreher, a member of the Browerville Knights of Columbus, owned an ideal property for the next cross: an elevated spot at the southwest corner of the intersection of County Roads 14 and 25.

“(Bechtold) thought our location would be a good location, being up on a hill,” Dreher said. “It’s open, where everyone can see it. We talked a little further into it, and then a plan came together, and over a couple of weekends, we put it up.”

The fifth cross was built in 2022 and blessed June 19, the Feast of Corpus Christi, that same year; that day also coincided with the kickoff for the National Eucharistic Revival. The cross was dedicated to Maryann Woeste, a longtime parishioner and sacristan at Christ the King.

“(Woeste is) our neighbor down the road,” Dreher said. “She drives past it every day when she’s driving into town for church or anything like that.”

The Browerville Knights of Columbus continue to take care of the crucifix shrines today. Around 2020, the council noticed some of the crosses were in poor condition; Tim Duncan, the council’s current grand knight, was born and raised in the Browerville area and helped take care of the crosses when he was growing up.

“My grandparents (and) neighbors took turns cutting grass, and I remember as a small kid going with them to cut grass,” he said. “We (Knights) just got in the conversation of how these have probably been here 100 years, but if they start looking tacky, someone might come along and say ‘We’ve got to cut them down,’ so that’s when we decided we were going to take over the maintenance of them.”

When the weather cooperates, nearby families handle mowing the grass near the crosses, while the Knights will rake back rocks, lay down fertilizer and attend to any repairs that may be needed.

“In the beginning, there was quite a bit of work,” Duncan said. “Now, … there isn’t much to it. … It’s amazing, the traffic that’ll stop and say thank you.”

The Browerville Knights pray rosaries at a cross twice a year, once in the fall and again the spring, rotating through the four crosses around Browerville. It is this prayer and maintenance that continues to tell Bechtold that the community is staying anchored in Christ.

“People don’t go out and attend to random landmarks or shrines without a reason,” Bechtold said. “There’s still this sense of ownership and honor and blessing attached to the care of these shrines established by people no longer with us here today.”