Westphalia, Iowa

A colony on railroad land

Westphalia began as a business plan as much as a dream. On March 1, 1872, the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad engaged Anton H. Kettler to find German Catholic buyers for its land in what was then Sumner Township, in the western part of Shelby County. The railroad wanted farmers who would settle, raise crops and ship them on its line, and it sweetened the offer: fifty cents from every acre sold would go toward building a church.

The first settlers arrived in the fall of 1872, among them Emil Flusche and his brothers, Anna Dreesmann and Herman Schwarte. In October 1873 the Flusche brothers took over the land agency, and Emil Flusche is often remembered as the founder of the colony. He later went on to start other German Catholic settlements, including Westphalia, Kansas.

Most of the early families came from the Province of Westphalia in northwestern Germany, which gave the town its name, but the settlers also included people from Hanover, Bavaria, Luxembourg, the Rhineland and Austria. On June 22, 1874, the town of Westphalia was platted on land that had been Herman Schwarte's farm, and in April 1875 Sumner Township itself was renamed Westphalia Township.

St. Boniface, the heart of the town

Religion came first in Westphalia, almost literally. In May 1873 Rev. John Kempker of Council Bluffs said the first Mass in the colony at a settler's home, and the next day he performed the colony's first wedding and first baptism. That August a simple frame church, 24 by 36 feet, went up on the future townsite. It was the first Catholic church in Shelby County, and for a time the parish served Catholics across the whole county. Later parishes at Panama, Portsmouth, Earling, Harlan and Defiance grew out of it.

In 1881 and 1882, under Rev. J. A. Weber, the parish built the brick church that still stands. It was designed in the Romanesque Revival style by Dubuque architect Fridolin Heer, and the bricks were made from local clay. Father Weber also started a parish school, and teaching sisters arrived around 1884. A rectory followed in 1888.

The church grounds kept growing in the 1900s, especially during the long pastorate of Rev. Hubert Duren, who came in 1926 and stayed 36 years. His era added a new parish school in 1927, a ball diamond, the Shrine of Our Lady of Grace in 1930, a corn crib in 1933 and a clubhouse in 1934. In 1991 the whole group, with the church, rectory, cemetery, school and shrines, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the St. Boniface Catholic Church District.

Farming the open prairie

The land the settlers bought was rolling, open prairie with almost no trees. That was good for the plow but hard on everything else. Lumber for the first church had to be hauled by wagon from Avoca and Harlan, across creeks that had no bridges yet. Families broke the sod, built small frame houses, and raised the corn, small grains and livestock that became the mainstay of western Iowa. The railroad that sold them the land also gave them a way to get crops to market.

For immigrants from Germany and Luxembourg, the attraction was clear. Good farmland at home was scarce and expensive, while here a family could buy its own acres on railroad terms and live among neighbors who spoke their language and shared their faith. Life was not easy, with hard winters, long distances and the work of building a town from nothing, but the community grew quickly through the 1870s.

Farming stayed at the center of parish life. The church grounds include a shrine to St. Isidore, the patron saint of farmers, and the corn crib built in 1933 is known locally as the First Fruits crib, a reminder of the custom of offering part of the harvest to the church.

The Schwarte, Blum and Schiltz families

Several family names run through Westphalia's story from the beginning. Herman Schwarte, born in Hanover, was among the very first settlers in 1872, and the town itself was laid out on his farm. Joseph Blum appears in the lists of new arrivals in 1874, and the Blum family later became one of the largest in the parish. The Schiltz name, which comes from Luxembourg, also took root in the area, and the Schiltz, Blum and Schwarte families all have entries in the parish's 125th anniversary history.

These families married into one another and into their neighbors' families over the generations, which is typical of close rural parishes like this one. Many of them are buried in St. Boniface Cemetery, which was laid out in 1874.

Jubilees and Westphalia today

Westphalia has always liked to mark its anniversaries. The parish celebrated its Golden Jubilee in 1922, fifty years after the colony was founded, and the occasion was important enough to earn its own chapter in the parish history published for the 125th anniversary in 1997. The community marked 150 years in 2022. The St. Boniface Fourth of July picnic, a tradition dating to 1882, is another long-running gathering.

Today Westphalia is a quiet town of 126 people (2020 census), a few miles west of U.S. Highway 59 and south of Harlan. The brick church, its steeple repaired in the 1990s, still rises over the fields, and the town keeps one of Iowa's longest-running amateur baseball teams and a German Heritage Park on its east edge.