Shopiere: Connecticut Yankees and a Limestone Church

Shopiere is a small unincorporated community in Rock County, Wisconsin, and its name is one of the stranger etymologies in the state. It comes from chaux pierre, French for limestone, reflecting the abundant stone deposits in the area. The first settlers arrived in the eighteen thirties, a colony of transplants from Connecticut who brought New England building traditions with them.

The congregation they formed in eighteen forty-four, organized by a circuit-riding pastor named Reverend Stephen Peet, eventually raised a church building between eighteen fifty and eighteen fifty-three using locally quarried limestone. The result is a simple Greek Revival structure. Its tower and octagonal belfry are unusual for Wisconsin, possibly because the builders simply reproduced what they had known back home.

One of its early members, Louis P. Harvey, served briefly as governor of Wisconsin during the Civil War before drowning in the Tennessee River in eighteen sixty-two while visiting wounded troops. The congregation first met in a log schoolhouse, then in a small chapel, before the stone church went up for two thousand dollars.

The blocks are rough-cut and rock-faced, laid in courses. In eighteen seventy-one, tall Gothic-style pointed windows were added along the sides, so the Greek Revival building also carries a little Gothic. The church was added to the National Register of Historic Places on August thirteenth, nineteen seventy-six, and it is probably the second oldest church in continuous use in Rock County.

The settlement itself was first called Waterloo, and a hundred fifty-four people lived here at the twenty twenty census.