WAUSA — The community of Wausa is seeing an iconic church steeple return to its skyline just over a year after a severe thunderstorm tore it down.
The skeleton of a new steeple was lifted by a tall red and gray crane onto the top of Thabor Lutheran Church in Wausa on July 11 in front of a nearby crowd of spectators viewing from the ground – sitting in various vehicles and standing on the street – under a clear blue sky.
“We’re very pleased that it’s finally coming together,” said Dave Carlson, the vice president of the church council and the head of the church’s property committee. “It’s been a long year, no question, but sometimes you just have to be patient and know that things will end up the right way.”
The 121-year-old white church building lost its steeple due to the straight-line winds — with the fastest gusts estimated at more than 80 miles per hour — that blew through northeast Nebraska on July 10, 2023.
“We knew that it was going to be a slow process,” Carlson said. “Our priority at that time was to weatherproof the church.”
He said he is pleased to see other damage to the church building has been repaired and the roof has been reshingled.
“Now they’re working on (the steeple),” Carlson said. “It’s taken a lot of engineering on their part to make it come out the same as it was before. It’s all coming together.”
The general contractor on the steeple- building project is Darby Landgren of Landgren Construction out of Sioux Falls, S.D.
“The contractor had to figure out how he was going to do this,” Carlson said. “We left all those decisions up to him. The only thing that we requested was we wanted it to be as close to the original (steeple) as possible. It appears to me so far that it’s coming together very well. We’re happy.”
Landgren Construction and its subcontractors started working on the project in June.
“They’ve been diligently working at different times on it,” Carlson said. “They’ve had some weather delays, which is normal. It’s coming together pretty good now. We’re really, really pleased with how things are happening and how it’s all going.”
He noted an immediate concern church council members had last year was who were they going to find to rebuild the steeple.
“Who has the equipment, who has the knowledge?” Carlson said, noting an insurance adjuster suggested Landgren Construction. “Right away, he was more than willing and cooperative. It was a big relief as soon as we found him. We had him down here within a couple of weeks after (the storm) happened.”
The original blueprints for the church building could not be found, but there have been several photos taken of the structure over the years that show what the old steeple looked like.
Salem Lutheran Church in Wakefield also provided an example of an existing steeple that Landgren Construction could use as it built the new one for Thabor Lutheran.
“There is a church that was designed by the same engineering/architect firm out of Lincoln,” Carlson said. “The one in Wakefield — we went over (earlier this spring) and looked at it and crawled up in the steeple.”
Salem Lutheran’s steeple is slightly smaller physically, but it is a similar design to the one Thabor Lutheran lost last year.
“The position of the front entrance is the same, the bell tower was the same — everything was very, very similar,” Carlson said. “We crawled up into the bell tower and steeple. They took a lot of measurements and pictures and drawings. They were getting it all put together.”
He brought the church’s bell back to the building on July 10 with a skid loader and set it down. It was hoisted up to the bell tower and installed early in the morning on July 11, just over a year after it was blown down with the steeple and found on the ground to the west of the church.
“I had (the bell) in my storage unit for last summer and over the winter,” Carlson said. “And then this spring, I started digging out the pieces and we repaired everything that was broken. We put it all back together, rebuilt some parts. It was me and a few other people at my former store (Carlson Home & Auto). I had some guys there helping me.
“I built a new rope pulley for it myself,” he said. “That was made out of wood, so I built that (out of wood). The original one was wood, so I was able to salvage the pieces – some of the pieces – and I reconstructed it as close as I could to the original. One of the side brackets was broken. We had to take that to a machinist and have him repair that, weld that back together.”
He did not have an estimated price tag for the overall project, but said insurance has covered most of the cost, as have some donations.
“It’s gone well; it’s gone smoothly,” Carlson said. “Everybody would wish that it would be an instant replacement. We knew that wasn’t going to happen. I knew that this was going to be a very complicated process and project to get this all done, and it was going to take some time.”
His goal is to see the steeple-building project completed by this fall.
“There’s a lot of metalwork that has to be done,” Carlson said. “There’s stained glass windows. There’s a lot of work to be done yet. As far as I’m concerned, if we can get it done before winter, I’ll be happy.”
