Jacobs Prairie is an

unincorporated community An unincorporated area is a parcel of land that is not governed by a local general-purpose municipal corporation. (At p. 178.) They may be governed or serviced by an encompassing unit (such as a county) or another branch of the state (such as th ...

in Wakefield Township,

Stearns County Stearns County is a county in the U.S. state of Minnesota. As of the 2020 census, the population was 158,292. Its county seat and largest city is St. Cloud. Included within the Minnesota Territory since 1849, the county was founded by Europe ...

Minnesota Minnesota ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Upper Midwestern region of the United States. It is bordered by the Canadian provinces of Manitoba and Ontario to the north and east and by the U.S. states of Wisconsin to the east, Iowa to the so ...

, United States. The community is located along Stearns County Road 2 at Glacier Road near Cold Spring and Rockville.

History

The community was homesteaded beginning in 1854 by German- and

Luxembourgish Luxembourgish ( ; also ''Luxemburgish'', ''Luxembourgian'', ''Letzebu(e)rgesch''; ) is a West Germanic language that is spoken mainly in Luxembourg. About 400,000 people speak Luxembourgish worldwide. The language is standardized and officiall ...

-speaking Catholic settlers; including Bavarians,

Eifel The Eifel (; , ) is a low mountain range in western Germany, eastern Belgium and northern Luxembourg. It occupies parts of southwestern North Rhine-Westphalia, northwestern Rhineland-Palatinate and the southern area of the German-speaking Com ...

ers, and

Luxembourgers Luxembourgers ( ; ) are an ethnic group native to their nation state of Luxembourg, where they make up around half of the population. They share the culture of Luxembourg and speak Luxembourgish, a West Germanic language. Luxembourgers w ...

. The settlers were invited to the area by Slovenian

Roman Catholic priest The priesthood is the office of the ministers of religion, who have been commissioned ("ordained") with the holy orders of the Catholic Church. Technically, bishops are a priestly order as well; however, in common English usage ''priest'' re ...

, missionary, and

poet A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator (thought, thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems (oral t ...

Fr.

Francis Xavier Pierz Francis Xavier Pierz ( or ''Franc Pirec''; ) (November 20, 1785 – January 22, 1880) was a Slovenian-American Roman Catholic priest and missionary to the Ottawa (tribe), Ottawa and Ojibwe Indians in present-day Michigan, Wisconsin, Ontario, and ...

, who had submitted letters and advertisements to the major German-language newspapers across the United States, like ''

Der Wahrheitsfreund ''Der Wahrheitsfreund'' or ''Der Wahrheits-Freund'' ("The Friend of Truth") was the first German language newspapers in the United States, German language Catholic Church in the United States, Catholic newspaper in the United States, and one of ma ...

'' (''The Friend of Truth''), and in Europe, urging "good, pious" German Catholics to venture to the Sauk River Valley of central Minnesota. Fr. Pierz described the Sauk River Valley as a “land flowing with milk and honey” as well as safe from disease and anti-Catholic discrimination. The community's name derives from two of its earliest settlers, brothers Nicholas and Theodore Jacobs. The community quickly established a country school, a blacksmith shop, and a church of simple means. The church, known as St. James Parish, served as a focal point for the settlers of Jacobs Prairie as well as settlers in neighboring areas, including St. Nicholas, Cold Spring, and Rockville. During the grasshopper plagues of 1856-57, the parishioners of St. James engaged in votive processions, seeking deliverance from the locusts. Twenty years later in August 1877, during another locust outbreak, the parishioners again engaged in procession, processing from Jacobs Prairie to a chapel specially built "to secure relief from the damage done by the hordes of grasshoppers" some four miles away just outside of Cold Spring known as ''Maria Hilf'' (currently known as Assumption Chapel). The German-language newspaper, ''Der Nordstern'', published in St. Cloud covered the event, noting that the Jacobs Prairie pilgrims "were led by a wagon carrying the statue of the Virgin, and surrounding the wagon were twelve girls dressed in white and bearing white flags." The establishment of individual parishes in Cold Spring, Richmond, and Rockville in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, plus the construction of a flour mill, brewery, and granite company in Cold Spring along the nearby Sauk River shifted populations and altered economic opportunities in Jacobs Prairie. The community largely comprises farmland, residences, and the St. James Parish. The current church, located on County Road 2 between

St. Joseph According to the canonical Gospels, Joseph (; ) was a 1st-century Jewish man of Nazareth who was married to Mary, the mother of Jesus, and was the legal father of Jesus. Joseph is venerated as Saint Joseph in the Catholic Church, Eastern Orth ...

and Cold Spring was built in 1931 and is the fifth building to be constructed for the community, which now consists of approximately seventy-five families and thirty-five singles, widows, and widowers; previous buildings were destroyed by cyclone or fire. St. James Parish has the distinction of being the oldest incorporated parish in the Catholic Diocese of St. Cloud west of the Mississippi River.

History

References

Further reading