A New York architect sent plans in 1867 for a new church in Belle Plaine to Bishop Whipple, and the church was built in 1868 on land contributed by Territorial Judge Andrew G. Chatfield, founder of Belle Plaine. The congregation had organized in 1858 and reached its peak in 1871, when the Parochial Report to the Diocese recorded 16 families with a total of 70 members. In the 1860s and 1870s, large numbers of immigrants from Germany, Ireland, and Czechoslovakia came to the Minnesota River Valley. These Lutherans and Roman Catholics brought their own clergy and formed ethnic churches, leaving little need for an English-speaking Episcopal church, and for some the Episcopal Church's aristocratic image seemed incompatible with frontier life. The congregation slowly dwindled and disbanded in the 1950s. The church was built in the Prairie Gothic style, characterized by pointed arches, a steeply gabled roof, and functional wooden buttresses, and the Episcopal Church's use of Gothic architecture, then popular, symbolized tradition and history in the newly settled Minnesota River Valley.