Lebanon Lutheran Church

During the mid-nineteenth century, immigrant Swedes, Norwegians, and Danes settled in this area. In 1868 they organized a Scandinavian Lutheran Church with the Reverend T. H. Ward as pastor. On June 2, 1872, the Swedish members of the congregation withdrew to become part of the Augustana Synod and formed the Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Lebanon Church of Whitehall. A theological student, V. A. Youngberg, was called as the new church’s first pastor. The Swedes met in the Scandinavian Church until 1877, when they built this Gothic-inspired church using lumber cut from the surrounding woods and milled in the Covell-Stapes mill. Services were held in Swedish until the early 1930s. In the 1980s the neighborhood around the church was still known locally as Swedentown.