In La Cross, Wisconsin, another German-American art institution designed and manufactured church statuary and fine woodcarvings. It was established by E. Hackner, who was born in Germany, and had studied at the Munich Royal Academy of Art. He came to the U.S. in 1880, where he started his altar building business one year later at La Cross, Wisconsin. The Hackner firm won many prizes at public exhibitions and a gold medal in 1894 for their woodcarvings shown at an art show in Atlanta, Georgia. By the late 1890's Hackner employed thirty men.[26]

     Milwaukee's art scene was lively and attracted a great number of aspiring young painters, sculptors, and architects. Frequently several members of one family were engaged in operating a firm that was dedicated to provide artifacts and fine arts objects for religious establishments. The Brielmaier Company and Conrad Schmitt Studios were examples of successful family enterprises. Another German-born artisan, who ran a family business in Milwaukee, was Charles Lohr. He was an accomplished stonecutter and sculptor mainly in the business of making tombstones and other cemetery monuments. Charles Lohr was born in 1852 in Weinoldheim, Hesse-Darmstadt, and died in Milwaukee in 1912. His parents brought him to the U.S. in 1861. In 1871 Charles went to Milwaukee, where he learned marble sculpting. With his brothers Gottfried, Phillip, and Anton, he established the business Charles Lohr and Company Marble Works. It was Phillip Lohr, who became known as an altar builder and sculptor of religious statuary. He created the altar and pulpit for St. Stanislaus Church in Milwaukee and also did the figures of the apostles, which are placed on the outside walls of the church. He was one of the artists, who collaborated on the huge altar at St. Joseph's Convent. At the Convent of the Sisters of St. Francis, Phillip Lohr sculpted a large statue of the Virgin.[27] His son Robert Emmanuel followed in his footsteps and worked for Phillip Lohr's monument company in Milwaukee from 1912 on.[28]

     North of Wisconsin, in the state of Minnesota, there were a great number of German settlements established in the nineteenth century. They were not beyond the grasp of Benedictine outreach. Boniface Wimmer wanted to expand to the northern territories and to initiate missionary activities to convert the Indian population. The Benedictines established St. John's Abbey at Collegeville in Minnesota in 1866 and started a seminary there. They encountered Indians, and Boniface Wimmer arranged for a handful of German-born Benedictine sisters to teach school at Collegeville. The Ludwig-Missionsverein supported the Minnesota foundation.[29] Like St. Vincent in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, St. John's developed into a Benedictine College that attracts liberal arts students today.

     St. John's abbey church was consecrated in 1882 with a plan derived from that for the Green Bay Cathedral, which had greatly impressed the Collegeville abbot Alexius Edelbrock on a visit to the northern Wisconsin town. In the interior of St. John's above the high altar, Wilhelm Lamprecht's painting on canvas enriched the sanctuary. It represented St. Benedict in Glory, surrounded by eminent saints of the Benedictine Order. When the Abbey church was renovated in the 1960's, the painting was sent to the Benedictine Abbey Mission in Seoul, Korea.[30] In 1961 the exterior of St. John's was drastically altered by Marcel Breuer, the immigrant architect from the German Bauhaus school in Dessau, where a new style of modernist architecture had been developed in the 1920's. Assailed by the National Socialist regime as "decadent", the Bauhaus school was closed in 1933. A large number of the school's staff came to the U.S., where Modernism in architecture and design was welcomed and ultimately changed the appearance of American cities and rural communities. Marcel Breuer's new Abbey church in Collegeville, Minnesota, is a rare example of ecclesiastical architecture with a modernist vocabulary. Powerful free form sculptural shapes have replaced the nineteenth century Neo Gothic church design, and the daring enterprise of the Minnesota Benedictine community has been applauded for its courage to forego historic traditions. (Figure 95,).

     In St. Paul, Minnesota, the church of the Assumption contained the last and most stupendous work by the German-American church painter Johann Schmitt. It measured sixty-two by forty-two feet and represented the Virgin Mary's Assumption. Schmitt painted it in 1887. Five years later he made a contract to paint ten murals with scenes of the life of the Virgin Mary, but due to his failing health, he could only finish four of these murals. Unfortunately the entire church was redecorated in 1931 and new murals were painted in the sanctuary.[31]

     There are a great number of nineteenth century German settlements in the state of Minnesota. An interesting German rural community is New Ulm in Brown County in the South Central part of the state. It was founded in 1854 as a settlement by a group of Forty-Eighters and Turners, but the town also attracted German-American churches of several different denominations. Catholic German-Bohemians came to New Ulm to be able to practice their faith.[32] The town of New Ulm is primarily known for the Dakota Conflict, an uprising by the native American population, which started in 1862 and was put down by the settlers in a bloody battle. The event was painted eleven times by the German-American artist Anton Gag in panoramic panels, each 7 x 10 feet in size. Anton Gag was born in 1858 in a small village called Walk, south of Neustadt, Bohemia - the present day Czechoslovakia - and came to the United States in 1873 with his parents. Anton's father established a carriage building business in New Ulm. Anton went to Chicago to study art and returned to New Ulm in 1885. Throughout his life he struggled to become successful with a variety of art-related enterprises, including a photographic studio. His reputation today rests on the ceiling mural he painted in 1903 for New Ulm's Holy Trinity Cathedral.[33] The fresco is a beautiful depiction of the seated Christ, God the Father, and The Holy Spirit. Anton Gag was assisted in the interior decoration of Holy Trinity by two other German-American artists: Alex Schwendiger and Christian Heller. The three men had directed a short-lived art school in New Ulm[34] (Figure 96).

     Alex Schwendiger was born in Austria in 1862 and emigrated to the United States with his parents in 1879. His father Ignatz was an accomplished sculptor. Alex went to Munich in 1885 to study art for four years before he returned to New Ulm. In the local Brown County newspaper obituary for the artist, who died in 1934, tribute is being paid to his artistry: "Mr. Schwendiger has devoted his energies primarily to the art of decorating churches and enjoyed a measure of success, receiving many contracts for his work throughout this section of the country."[35] Unfortunately no mention was made of specific churches the artist had decorated.

     New Ulm's Holy Trinity church has an elaborate decorative program that was described at the time of its completion in 1903 in the local newspaper: "The decorations may be divided into three main classes: The sanctuary decorations, those on the middle sections of the church, and those on the side walls. The greatest labor and wealth of art has been displayed in the paintings on the walls and ceiling of the sanctuary. The central mural is the Trinity. On top is the Father, surrounded by a golden fire, underneath is the Son with his feet resting on the earth, and between them is the Holy Ghost in the shape of a dove. Kneeling on the right side of this group is Mary and on the left is St. Anne. Below this group in the shape of a half circle extending around the wall of the sanctuary are the images of the twelve apostles."[36] The Holy Trinity church murals in New Ulm present a rare case of close collaboration of three accomplished German-American artists.

     Some German-American church decorators traveled as far north as Canada to fulfill commissions. In 1868 Wilhelm Lamprecht, assisted by his young apprentice Frank Duveneck, painted the interior of St. Romuald d'Etchemin in New Liverpool, Quebec. The church had been consecrated twelve years earlier, but the parish arranged for the murals after a considerable interval of time. It is possible that Lamprecht was available only in 1868 or that the church members had to raise sufficient funds to finance his ambitious mural program. In any event, Lamprecht's fame had spread across the northern border of the United States. It is difficult to understand why the artist left the country to return to his native Germany in 1901 after having garnered accolades for his many beautiful church paintings.