Denmark Congregational Church

Denmark began as 'The Haystack' — the common haystack on the open prairie that gave the settlement its first name, where eighteen people wintered in a sixteen-by-eighteen log cabin on pork and cornmeal. The Congregational church organized on May 5, 1838 — thirty-two settlers covenanting together in what they believed was the first Congregational church west of the Mississippi. They were pioneers twice over: on the Black Hawk Purchase frontier, and at the leading edge of the abolitionist movement that Congregationalists carried west.

The church was strongly anti-slavery from the start, and Denmark became an important Underground Railroad stop — the town nine miles north of Fort Madison where the routes out of Missouri fed into Iowa's network. The congregation's early life was documented in the church manual: the split-board schoolhouse where they first met, the brick church raised in 1844–45, destroyed by fire in 1861, and rebuilt the following year — the congregation rebuilding its church in the middle of the war its antislavery convictions had helped bring.

The present church is the 1862 building — the Civil War-era replacement standing on the site where the town that began as a haystack on the prairie kept the faith it had organized in 1838. Denmark Academy, the congregation's school, made the town an educational center on the Iowa frontier — the church and the academy together the institution the New England settlers built at the edge of the purchase.

Denmark is the archive's frontier-congregation file — the church founded in a haystack settlement that believed itself the first Congregational body west of the Mississippi, the UGRR stop that burned in 1861 and rebuilt in wartime.