The Old Rock Church of Hazel Green

The stone church standing here is a surviving nineteenth century church in southwestern Wisconsin. Construction began in eighteen fifty-one, when Hazel Green was still a frontier lead-mining town, and both men and women of the Methodist Episcopal congregation labored for several years to raise its walls. The land was donated by a pioneer settler named Bosman Clifton in memory of his daughter, a gesture that gives the building a quietly personal origin beneath its public history.

The Rock Church, as locals call it, is built of stone, which is how it earned its name. The building has endured through generations, a plain stone reminder of what people built when they intended something to last.