In the mid-nineteenth century, many newly arrived Norwegian immigrants in southern Wisconsin depended on itinerant Lutheran ministers for spiritual and practical guidance as they adapted to the new land. One of the most influential was Rev. Elling Eielsen, who organized a congregation of fifty people in Primrose in 1850, and five years later that congregation built a log church in the community. Eielsen followed Hans Nielsen Hauge, a lay preacher who began a spiritual revival in Norway that emphasized democratic attitudes and faithfulness to the scriptures. In 1854, Pastor A.C. Preus, a university-trained minister of the Norwegian state church, established a second church in Primrose, the Primrose Norwegian Evangelical Lutheran Church, which emphasized traditional high-church principles and doctrine. The theological differences between the two congregations became the focus of the 1856 annual convention of Norwegian Lutheran churches held in Primrose and heightened existing divisions within Norwegian-American Lutheranism. The Primrose congregation later reconciled in 1915, and the present Primrose Lutheran Church combines the 1881 bell tower of the Norwegian Evangelical Lutheran Church with the 1894 Hauge Church, which was moved to this location in 1941.