St. Cornelia's Church

St. Cornelia's Episcopal Church stood at the center of Mdewakanton Dakota community life for several generations and became a symbol of Dakota continuity in the homeland from which they had once been exiled. Forced to sign away most of their traditional lands, the Dakota by the 1850s lived on a reservation along the Minnesota River, where the U.S. government at the Lower Sioux Agency was slow to provide the promised schools. In 1860, hereditary chief Wabasha and leaders Good Thunder and Taopi asked Episcopal Bishop Henry B. Whipple to begin a church and reservation school, and he sent 21-year-old Samuel D. Hinman to work with the Dakota people. Hinman's school soon had 50 pupils, and by 1862 a church building, with a cornerstone selected by Wabasha and laid by Whipple, was nearing completion. The church was destroyed in the 1862 conflict, and the Dakota were driven from the state. After more than 20 years in exile, some Dakota people returned to their former home in the 1880s, and by 1889 a new church was under construction on land donated by Good Thunder, using the same cornerstone from the 1862 church in a new location. Named for the wife of Bishop Whipple, St. Cornelia's was consecrated in 1891. After Hinman's death in 1890, Dakota leaders including Napoleon Wabasha, the Rev. Henry Whipple St. Clair, George Crooks, and Sam Wells led the congregation. Members of nearly every Dakota family in the area supported the church, and many of their children attended the mission school until it closed in 1920. In 1987, the remains of 31 Dakota who died in an Iowa prison after the U.S.-Dakota Conflict of 1862 were returned to rest there among their own people.

Minnesota · United States