Dickeyville Grotto

The story

In 1918, a German-born Catholic priest named Father Mathias Wernerus took over Holy Ghost Parish in tiny Dickeyville, Wisconsin, and decided the parish grounds needed more than lawn and limestone. Starting around 1920 with embellished concrete flower urns and scaling up by 1924, Wernerus spent six years embedding whatever raw or recycled material he could get his hands on into thick wet mortar. He worked organically without blueprints, slathering concrete over iron framework and pressing in shattered tableware, perfume bottle tops, seashells, starfish, petrified wood, lead ore, and chunks of South Dakota rose quartz.

The result is a dense, glittering maze of outdoor grottos where religious devotion meets aggressive American civic pride. Flanking the main cave of the Blessed Virgin—which houses an Italian Carrara marble statue behind protective glass—are dedicated shrines to Jesus alongside monuments to George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Christopher Columbus. Cultural historians point out that this twin devotion was not just eccentric flair: during the 1920s, Midwestern anti-Catholic sentiment ran high, and encasing Lincoln and Washington in concrete was Wernerus's loud declaration that a Catholic could be 100 percent loyal to the flag.

Wernerus died in 1931, shortly after the main complex was finished, but his obsessive handiwork ignited a regional folk-art movement that rippled across Wisconsin, inspiring art environments like the Wegner Grotto in Cataract. You didn't hear it from us, but while the site draws tens of thousands of curious road-trippers a year, it remains an active parish churchyard—meaning you'll be examining thousands of pressed perfume caps while local parishioners quietly go about their Sunday routine.