Ephraim: The Village That Walked Over the Ice

In February of eighteen fifty-three, a Norwegian-born Moravian minister named Andreas Iverson and a small party are said to have walked north over the frozen surface of Green Bay from the Moravian settlement near De Pere to reach the wilderness shore of Eagle Harbor on the Door Peninsula. They had no road, no boat, and no shelter waiting for them. They walked across the ice in winter.

They named the place Ephraim, after the biblical son of Joseph, which means doubly fruitful, and began building the oldest village in Door County. Iverson had been born in Norway and came to the Moravian faith, a Protestant tradition tracing its roots to fifteenth-century Bohemia. The Moravians placed particular emphasis on community life, shared ownership of land, music, and plain-spoken piety.

The village of Ephraim was founded with a church at the center, and Norwegian families who followed the founders across the bay. Ephraim remains one of the most intact nineteenth-century villages in Wisconsin. Its white-painted buildings sit on limestone bluffs above Eagle Harbor, a still crescent of water on the Green Bay side of the peninsula.

The original Moravian church still stands. The Ephraim Historical Foundation maintains several of the earliest structures and interprets the village's Norwegian and Moravian history. Something of the plain-spoken quality that Iverson carried across the ice more than a hundred and seventy years ago still reads in the village's proportions and its white paint.