Moorhead church falling

A century after construction crews began building it, demolition of the former Bethesda Lutheran Church in Moorhead began Friday.

Most recently a homeless shelter, the building served as an apartment house, a performing arts studio, a school and a funeral home at one time or another after Bethesda built a new church in south Moorhead in 1972. “It’s a sad day in Mudville, I tell you,” said Duane Bailey, a 67-year-old member of the Bethesda congregation.

Crews from Northern Improvement, the construction company hired by Churches United for the Homeless to demolish their former shelter, knocked down the steeple Friday morning, said project manager Molly McCormick.

Bailey, who joined the congregation in 1963, said visiting the demolition site was an emotional experience. “I’ve seen a lot of buildings come down, but not one with so much feeling to it,” he said.

Seeing the old church reminded him of teaching Sunday School there, pastors who taught there, choirs that sang there and the men’s club that met there. “You think about a lot of those things,” he said.

Northern Improvement will likely finish the job Monday, using a backhoe to level the building to a pile of bricks, McCormick said. That pile, save the steel trusses to be recycled, will be trucked to the landfill, she said.

Some items were saved from the church, built at 203 6th St. S. in 1905 and 1906 by the Bethesda Swedish Lutheran Church.

More than 40 stained-glass windows were auctioned off two weeks ago, bringing in about $15,000 for Churches United, Executive Director Gary Groberg said. Two of those windows, as well as the cross that hung on the steeple, were given to Bethesda.

Clay County Museum Curator Pam Burkhardt said the museum will try to salvage the church’s cornerstone, adding it to ones saved from the Hawley High School and the Clay County Courthouse.

Groberg said while Churches United is happy to be in its new facility on First Avenue North, seeing the shelter go down is difficult.

“I wish that somehow somebody could have saved the building, from a historical perspective. It was such an expensive proposition to do,” he said. The cost of renovating the building was estimated at $2 million.

The group is selling the land for $115,000 to Roger Erickson, a developer who plans to build a 12-unit condominium complex. Most of that money will be used to cover a city-backed loan Churches United used to help move to its new shelter.

Erickson is a Bethesda congregant who was baptized in the old church and was a member of the last class to be confirmed there.

“It’s sad to see it come down, but it kind of met its usefulness. What I’m going to put there is going to be some pretty nice condos,” he said.

Construction will likely begin in April and hopefully be completed by late fall on the condo complex, he said. Units will sell for between $150,000 and $180,000.

Photo caption: The old Churches United for the Homeless is steeple-less after a crew started demolition Friday in Moorhead. Dave Wallis / The Forum