This book is delivered as a PDF download. 115 pages.
Evind Birger Christoffersen Masonry Artist and the Building of Our Savior’s Lutheran Church, by Carol A. Anderson.
Four-year old Eivind Birger Christoffersen (my father) emigrated from Hamar, Norway, with his parents and two younger siblings in 1905. The family lived in Minneapolis where his father was a bricklayer and where Eivind learned the trade. In the early twenties Dad relocated to Chicago, the first city to embrace the building of skyscrapers. He married Dorothy Olander in 1926, became the father of two, and lived the good life until the Depression changed everything.
Eivind and family relocated to northern Wisconsin in the thirties, and added five more children. He found work wherever he could during those years. After World War II, construction in his area improved, and he found work throughout southern Wisconsin. In 1948 he was asked to rescue a failed church building project in New Haven, Iowa. The experience led him to discover Osage. He was asked to become the builder of the new Lutheran church. In 1951 our family moved to Osage.
Talk about “building from scratch!” The church and parish hall were to be built of native Iowa lithographic limestone; such stone was to be found locally. Dad wore many new hats during the project—from teaching a worker how to cut and shape the stone to meeting with the ladies’ aid society on their desires of the new kitchen, to trips to Minneapolis to meet with the architects! His evenings, usually till midnight, were spent poring over blueprints and laying out the next day’s schedule.
When completed in 1955, I know the building project gave Eivind the most joy and satisfaction of any project he’d been responsible for. Today, nearly 70 years later, the church receiving the honor to be listed on the “National Register of Historic Places,” would make him smile.
There were two reasons why I wanted to write this book: 1) To honor my brother Paul (1937-2018), who had put together a database of our father’s jobs, large and small, from the years, 1946-1976, and 2) To hopefully inspire someone in the church to seek national recognition for the complex. That person turned out to be a parishioner, Jerry Fisk, who spent over three years in the pursuit and was successful in those efforts.
