How a northern Minnesota Russian Orthodox church came back to life

This story was originally published by MNopedia on July 1, 2025.

Active only from 1918 until 1932, St. Peter and St. Paul Russian Orthodox Church in Bramble served a small number of farming families who had ventured north from Chisholm to claim homesteads. The church received a new lease on life in 1968 when it was “discovered” by Paul Berg, an Episcopal priest from Grand Rapids. Berg’s restoration efforts led to a renewed interest in the church, which has continued to inspire the religious and artistic imagination of the region.

In the late nineteenth century, eastern European immigrants flooded into the United States to work in mines and factories. Immigrants from the northeastern corner of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, often referred to as Ruthenians or Rusyns, filled the steel mills a