On February 20, 1882, thirty founders signed the charter of the Evangelical Lutheran St. Peter Church in Macomb Township. They laid the cornerstone of their first church on May 29, 1882, across from the school built by their former congregation in 1877, and placed within it a letter to their descendants saying that they had immigrated from Mecklenburg in Germany to America, joined the Evangelical Lutheran Immanuel's Congregation in Waldenburg because its confessions and beliefs matched those of their old fatherland, and begun a new home in the West. Pastor Friedrich Boeling dedicated the white wooden church and cemetery on December 10, 1882, and served both congregations until Pastor Oscar Wuest became St. Peter's first resident pastor in 1887. By 1880 numerous Germans had settled in Macomb Township, many establishing farms in the Clinton River Basin, and of the township's more than two thousand people, some thirteen hundred were foreign-born or second-generation Germans. They were part of a fifty year migration that brought more than two million Germans to the United States. For more than seventy years St. Peter Lutheran Church held services in German, with monthly English services beginning in 1923. Although altered since its construction in 1926, the red brick school to the south long served the congregation and community as a place for social events and meetings, and in 1962 the congregation built a new four-room school on this corner of Twenty-Four Mile Road, which became the foundation for a growing church and school campus.