Prairie families raised a church to hold their dead and living together
Salem United Church of Christ has stood in Steinauer since 1879, built by German-immigrant farm families who had already opened Rinne Cemetery in 1868 and Salems Cemetery in 1869 nearby. The church later saw a settler shot on its road in 1894 and lost residents to the 1918 influenza pandemic that swept Pawnee County.
Families buried their dead before they built a church
Before Salem United Church of Christ stood here, the dead already had a place. In 1868, settlers around Steinauer opened Rinne Cemetery, about a mile and a quarter from this spot. A year later, families opened another burial ground, Salems Cemetery, closer still. Both held the dead of German-immigrant farm families years before any church building stood among them.
That was the order of things on this prairie. Families arrived, cleared land, and buried their own before they built anywhere to worship. Rinne Cemetery and Salems Cemetery marked two points on open ground. Neighbors tended them. They gathered for services in houses, barns, or under open sky. A preacher came where they could find one.
By the late 1870s, German-settler families had been burying their dead in these same fields. They were ready to fix their worship in one place too. In 1879, they organized Salem United Church of Christ and built its church on this exact ground. What had been an informal, moving congregation now had a permanent address to match its cemeteries.
A settler was shot on the road to Salem's church
The permanent address the church gave this settlement did not keep it peaceful. In 1894, during a drought year, a Bavarian-born settler named Karl Schultz was shot on the road from Salem's church. Schultz had run a brewery in Wisconsin before settling near Steinauer. The dispute was over hedge fence posts a deputy named Abbott accused him of stealing. Schultz's own sons watched the confrontation happen. He was carried into Steinauer and died there of his wounds.
The killing happened on the same road that carried families to Sunday service. Land and property, not faith, turned neighbors against each other on it.
Influenza reached the families this church had gathered
Twenty-four years after Schultz died on the church road, a different threat reached the same close families. In 1918, influenza swept through Pawnee County and into Steinauer. Residents here died of it, part of the pandemic that killed tens of millions worldwide that year. The families the church and its two cemeteries had bound into one community now faced a single disaster as one body. A scattered settlement of separate farms might have absorbed the sickness house by house. A fixed one, gathered every Sunday under the same roof, could not.
A second cemetery followed the first within a year
The church's cemeteries had grown fast even before its walls went up. Rinne Cemetery opened in 1868. Just a year later, in 1869, families laid out a second ground. They called it Salems Cemetery. It stood about a mile and a half from where the church now stands. Two burial grounds within a year of each other meant a settlement filling in quickly. Its dead accumulated almost as fast as its living arrived. The church that rose a decade later gave a name and a building to a community whose graves had already been counting it.
The church still stands at the center of the ground its dead and living have shared since before it existed.
Every person, building and event in this story opens into its own dig in the app — and it will dig the ground you are standing on instead, wherever that is.