St. Peter Lutheran Church

On February 20, 1882, thirty founders signed the charter of the Evangelical Lutheran St. Peter Church. They laid the cornerstone of their first church on May 29, 1882, across from the school built by their former congregation in 1877. Within the cornerstone was a letter to their descendants. It began, "We, your ancestors, once immigrated from Germany, from Mecklenburg, to this new western land America to begin a new home. We joined the Evangelical Lutheran Immanuel's Congregation in Waldenburg, since their confessions and beliefs agreed with those in our old fatherland." Pastor Friedrich Boeling dedicated the white, wooden church and cemetery on December 10, 1882. He served both congregations until Pastor Oscar Wuest became St. Peter's first resident pastor in 1887. By 1880 numerous Germans had settled in Macomb Township. Many of them established farms in the Clinton River Basin. Of the more than two thousand people in the township, some thirteen hundred were foreign-born or second-generation Germans. They were part of a fifty-year migration that brought more than two million Germans to the United States. For more than seventy years St. Peter Lutheran Church held services in German. Monthly English services began in 1923. Although altered since its construction in 1927, the red brick school to the south has long served the congregation and community as a place for social events and meetings. In 1962 the congregation built a new four-room school on this corner of Twenty-Four Mile Road; it became the foundation for a growing church and school campus.