The Rev. Steve Emanuel, himself a great-great grandson of John and Caroline Emanuel, welcomes a crowd of about 100 people to the Mass and dedication of the altat donated by the descendants of John and Caroline on Memorial Day.
Emanuel family tree donates altar
by Nathan Arneal
Published 5/29/24
Though partially obscured by grass, you can still see portions of the sidewalk leading to St. Mary’s Catholic Church. What you cannot see is the church itself.
St. Mary’s Catholic Church of Ridgeley, nine miles north of North Bend and four miles east of Webster, burned to the ground for a second and final time in 1927.
While the church is gone, the community that it developed in the Ridgeley area lives on, and they haven’t forgotten St. Mary’s. Most of them are (or were) named Emanuel.
Adjacent to the footprint of the old church is the still-very-active St. Mary’s Cemetery.
About two years ago, Mary Von Seggern decided it would be appropriate to place a new altar at St. Mary’s.
You see, donating altars is a bit of a family tradition. Von Seggern took inspiration from her great- grandparents John and Caroline Emanuel.
John emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1867 at 20 years of age. He and Caroline settled in Pleasant Valley Township in Dodge County in 1869.
They would have 15 children, giving rise to the many Emanuel families that still populate the landscape of Dodge County.
Not many of the area’s earliest settlers were Catholic. The first American Emanuels had to trek to St. Anthony’s of St. Charles a couple miles southwest of West Point or into Fremont for Mass. Both were trips of about 20 to 25 miles, requiring a departure from home at 3 a.m. to make it in time for services.
In the late 1870s a small mission church was begun at Glencoe, cutting the Emanuel’s Sunday commute to about 5 miles. The congregation quickly outgrew to church and a new one was built at Ridgeley, 6.5 miles east of the Emanuel homestead. The Glencoe church was moved to this location to serve as rectory and a new church building was built and named St. Mary’s.
This Glencoe-Ridgley church was the second in Dodge County, following only St. Patrick’s in Fremont.
John and Caroline Emanuel donated the high altar used at St. Mary’s. They also donated an altar for St. Patrick’s of Clyde after it opened in 1885 four miles south of their home. They also gave an altar to St. Francis Academy in Columbus, where 14 of their 15 children attended school (the 15th died in infancy), as did 20 grandchildren.
Three of their daughters became nuns and one son, Francis, became the first priest produced by Dodge County.
Keeping with the tradition, the children of John and Caroline Emanuel donated the high altar for St. Charles Borromeo church in North Bend when its new (and current) building opened in 1916, five years after John’s death.
Now, the tradition continues with a new altar at St. Mary’s.
“That was kind of in the back of my mind,” Mary Von Seggern said. “I just casually made the remark, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to have an altar out here,’ and the family responded to that. We are this generation now.”
Von Seggern raised the money for the new altar through donations from the descendants of John and Caroline, which, as we’ve established, are plentiful.
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