Namur in Door County, Wisconsin, became a center of Belgian-American community life for Walloon-speaking Roman Catholic immigrants who arrived in the 1850s from Brabant, Hainaut, and Namur in Belgium. Led by Father Edward Daems, they celebrated the first Catholic mass in Namur in the home of Guilluame Delwiche, then built a log church in 1860 on land donated by Alexander Evrard, a structure that survived the Great Fire of 1871. A larger church rose on the same site in 1874, with a brick rectory added in 1884 and later additions including a classroom, steeple, and bell, but the church burned in 1892 and was rebuilt under Father Vanier, remaining central to the community's spiritual and social life for the next 100 years. Designed in the Gothic Revival style and built of locally made red brick, the church later closed after the Catholic Diocese of Green Bay consolidated St. Mary of the Snows and St. Francis Xavier parishes in 1993; it was decommissioned in 2000, and after standing vacant, it was purchased in 2010 by the Namur Belgian Heritage Foundation and repurposed as the Belgian Heritage Center. Namur was also significant in the history of the Norbertine Fathers in North America: in 1893 Father Bernard Pennings, Father Lambert Broens, and Brother Servatius Heesakkers came from Berne Abbey in Holland to serve the growing parish, and St. Mary of the Snows became Father Pennings' first home and congregation in the New World before he moved to De Pere and founded the priory of St. Norbert, St. Norbert College, and later supervised the creation of the Abbey in 1924. Education was equally important to the Belgian settlers, who faced cultural, social, and physical isolation in the Door Peninsula; after beginning to vote and hold office in 1858, they improved roads, established school districts, and hired teachers. In 1889 two schools opened in Namur, a Town of Union School District one-room building near the church and a parochial school in an addition to the church, with nuns and lay teachers serving both. After the 1892 fire destroyed the school building, public and parochial students briefly shared space, and in 1894 parishioners funded and built a new two-story school and convent through the sale of donated grain. The building housed classrooms and living quarters for teaching sisters or sometimes students, later stood idle after the parochial school closed in 1925, and eventually became the Peninsula Belgian-American Club Headquarters.