05/21/2026
Hello my friends, Ben here… one of the lunch ladies at school apparently found this I think in her mother’s basement or something? This was the centennial release of the church directory of the Iowa conference of the Wesleyan Church in 1953. I only had a few minutes to flip through it, but there is some interesting history here.
Incidentally, you will not find our church in this book. Some of your longtime heartland folks will know this, but our church was founded by a merger of two churches, one of them here in Laporte city, and the other out in the country. Both of those churches are listed and pictured in this book. There is also an interesting story about our church as well. When they decided to merge, they decided to use the building that was out in the country. One of our founding elders, Francis Christian lifted up the whole building and put it on a trailer and started driving the thing into town. He ran into trouble at the main street bridge as at the time it was a steel frame bridge not the bridge we have today. He couldn’t fit the building under the bridge. He had to actually let the air out of his tires to get it under, and it just slipped through. The building was placed in the area that is the empty lot between our current building and the parsonage. In the 1960s, it was decided that it was time to build a new building. And the building was picked up again and someone would have to tell me where it ended up. I don’t recall. I believe it wound up somewhere else in town here.
The basement was filled in, including leaving an old piano down there. And the old part of our building or original part was built. This would be the original basement where KidCity is, that served as our kitchen and fellowship hall as well as the Sunday school area for kids and teenagers most of the time. Our current fellowship hall was the sanctuary where adults also had Sunday school, and the young adults met in the back. The Pastor had an office where Tami’s office currently is now.
In the 1990s it was decided that we needed more room. And we started building the new addition, including the route 122 area, Dani’s office, Pastor Chad‘s current office, the new sanctuary where we meet now, the new kitchen in the back of the current fellowship hall, and an expanded foyer. We also built a new nursery and added an elevator.
If you would like to look at this book, I will have it on my desk for people to look at. 
