St. Paul Lutheran Church marks 100 years with sermon, picnic

Members and visitors gathered at St. Paul Lutheran Church in the Town of Hamburg on Aug. 2, 2026, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the current church building, an occasion that blended reflection on the congregation’s long history with the simple pleasure of a shared meal outdoors.
Pastor Joel Danner opened the celebration with a sermon, and the congregation and guests enjoyed a picnic afterward.
The church’s roots stretch back further than its building, to a time when Hamburg was still thick woods and its earliest German settlers were carving out farms. Two Lutheran churches, Salem to the south and St. John’s to the east, already served the area, but new arrivals found the travel too difficult and began pushing for a congregation closer to home. Those discussions led to a meeting in 1880 with traveling missionary Pastor William Luedtke, out of which St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church was formed. For years afterward, services moved between members’ homes and, once the congregation outgrew those spaces, the Barney School House, which once stood near where the Hamburg maintenance building sits today. The congregation’s earliest surviving meeting minutes, written in German script, date to Dec. 2, 1882, and its Articles of Incorporation were acknowledged by the Marathon County Register of Deeds five years later, on Dec. 22, 1887.
The congregation built its first church, a log building measuring 22 by 32 ft., in 1895, after someone reported the group for holding services in a public school. Members supplied the logs and the labor, and Albert Zastrow donated the acre of land the church still sits on. Rev. John Rien became the first pastor to serve there.
Three decades later, in 1926, the congregation was asked to dissolve and merge with the Salem and St. John’s parish. Members refused, choosing instead to build anew. They put up the brick church that still stands today, a 20-by-56-ft. building erected on the same acre, just south of the old log church, at a cost of $6,000 plus donated labor and materials. By 1932, the building’s value was estimated at $12,000.

The church has been updated steadily in the decades since. Wood heat gave way to oil in 1955, the year the interior was repainted, a new altar and lectern were built, new lighting went in, the basement was remodeled, and a new organ arrived, along with a larger parking lot and freshly planted trees. The kitchen was remodeled in 1976, and the following year, the congregation replaced its old brick steeple with a lighted, tiered one. The interior was repainted again in 1984. An enclosure went up on the church’s east side in 1994 and was finished in 1995 to cover newly built steps. A new well was dug in 1997, and by 1998 the church had a septic tank, a downstairs restroom, new sanctuary carpeting, entryway tile, a new furnace, and new basement windows.
The main floor got new windows in 2003, and a steel roof followed in 2005. In 2006, the tiered steeple was replaced once more, this time with the lighted, neon red cross that still marks the church and can be seen for miles at night.
A hundred years after the brick church went up, the congregation says the building has changed many times over, and more changes are likely ahead. Members describe their faith in the church less in terms of its walls than in the people who fill them, saying they aim to honor its history through faithful service, unity, and support for the church’s ongoing ministry.