German immigrants built St. Paul Lutheran

St. Paul Lutheran Church in Mount Prospect, which today has more than 1,400 members, was founded on July 7, 1912, by 17 men, all German immigrants.

The core group banded together in March of that year to explore the possibility of founding a new church on two acres of land donated by William and Edward Busse.

They were tired of carting their families two and half miles south every Sunday to St. John's Lutheran Church in what is now Elk Grove Village. They also wanted a church school closer to home. In the days of horses and buggies, that was a considerable distance to travel over unpaved, often muddy, roads.

Once the charter came through for a church, the group broke ground on the original brick building on the northeast corner of Busse Avenue and Elm Street, and the congregation searched for a pastor, eventually choosing the Rev. J.E.A. Mueller, who had been serving a church in North Dakota. He arrived by train on New Year's Day 1913.

Mueller delivered his first sermon less than two weeks later in Central School, where the congregation was gathering while waiting for their church to be built, and he opened a church school the following day.

For four years Mueller served as both minister and schoolteacher to 34 children in a one-room schoolhouse. When it all became too taxing, they added a schoolteacher.

In the early years, St. Paul services and meetings were conducted entirely in German. In fact, on the dedication booklets from 1913, the proper name of the new church was "Ev.-Luth. St. Paulus Kirche," the German version of St. Paul Evangelical Lutheran Church.

But, in the school, children learned all of their academic subjects in English. Only the religious classes were conducted in German, which most families still spoke at home.

The practice of speaking German in church ended abruptly when World War I broke out.

Two more one-room schoolhouse buildings were added over the years to make a three-house string of schoolrooms connected by breezeways. Then, in 1928, these were sold at auction and moved and a larger school building was built in their place. Schoolteacher Martin Hasz bought the largest of the three houses and moved it to 10 S. Elm St., where he lived until his death. The home still stands.

The current church building on the southwest corner of School Street and Busse Avenue was built in 1961 and updated in 2007-08, while the current school building opened in 1990. It boasts approximately 250 students in preschool through eighth grade.