It rises out of a clearing, looking for all the world like part of a movie set for the classic 1958 film The Vikings: the simple wooden walls, the pagoda-style roofs, and, most striking of all, the intricately carved dragon heads that watch over the church and the landscape like lookouts on a Viking ship. On a misty spring day, you could stand before it and imagine yourself in 12th-century Norway instead of 21st-century Washington Island.

The stavkirke—literally, “stave church”—is a replica of the Borgund stavkirke, a wooden stave church built near Laerdal, Norway, around 1150. This version was hand-built by congregants from the nearby Trinity Lutheran Church and other Washington Islanders, who constructed the church in homage to their Icelandic and Norwegian heritage.

The church marries past and present, tradition and contemporary culture, through details like the ship model suspended in the nave of the church. Norwegian churches often display a ship like this somewhere, a symbol of the community’s relationship with the sea; this stavkirke’s ship is a replica of a 19th-century Mackinaw schooner. Which is fitting for a church on an island, whose history is inextricably bound up with the seagoing culture of the Great Lakes.

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Correction:

©Don Abrams

Many thanks to our eagle-eyed readers who caught an error in our May/June issue. The interior photos that we published in our print edition (like the photo above) do not show the inside of the Washington Island Stavkirke but are from another Door County stavkirke, Björklunden's Boynton Chapel. The correct photos can be seen to the right. We apologize for our mistake.

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