A name you remember. A building you pass. A story you want to know. Explore our growing collection of Hooper history.
61 published stories · 20 tour stops · 748 source references · Growing with every discovery
Matching passages and citation notes from our published collection.
In “St. Rose: from a family home to a parish”
St. Patrick’s official parish history dates St. Rose and St. Lawrence of Scribner joining its parish family to 2019. St. Charles Borromeo of North Bend and St. Leo of Snyder followed in 2023. That account supplies the participating churches’ own explanation of the more recent relationship.
In “The gates and the churchyard”
In 1922, Elim became a single parish after earlier arrangements with churches in Oakland and Fremont, and changed its program from Swedish to English. By the time Sampson wrote, its community Midsummer Festival was another longstanding part of life on the church grounds.
That Winslow can be difficult to picture after the destruction of March 2019. But the village beside Hooper had stores, two banks, schools, churches, a hotel, a volunteer fire department and celebrations that drew its neighbors in. Its history stretches beyond the disaster—and continues beyond it.
In “Offset printing and another family generation”
Other people helped make the paper a continuing record of the area. The centennial history names Violet Hamrick as a Linotype operator and credits Luella Sampson with forty-nine years as a correspondent for the Swaburg area. That rural reporting mattered: a town newspaper could preserve the activities of farm neighborhoods and churches miles beyond Main Street.
The November 5 issue of The Hooper Sentinel gives us a remarkably detailed look at that evening—and at a town where Halloween belonged to children, churches, clubs and neighbors. The “ghosts” in these accounts were people in costumes, and the newspaper made room for the food, games and hosts who helped everyone enjoy the occasion.
Those groups helped furnish public buildings, maintain parks, support young people and give neighbors reasons to meet. Some were business organizations, some were lodges, and others grew out of women’s educational work, churches or shared interests. Their histories overlap, but their names should not be treated as interchangeable.
Hooper had churches, a school, waterworks, electric lights and even a curfew bell. What more could an improvement society possibly do?
In “What this is”
The schools and churches that organized daily life for generations
From Hooper’s first classrooms and Uehling’s Bobcats to today’s Logan View Raiders: school buildings, teachers, teams, music, agriculture and generations of students in photographs and original newspapers.
St. John’s moved a church in 1881 and brought a later building into Hooper in the mid-1950s. A surviving photograph captures the second journey.
In 1880, a storm ruined St. Paul’s nearly completed church. Its rebuilding, cemetery and surviving records tell a longer story of rural Hooper.
The old St. John’s Ridgeley church burned in 1993. A surviving register preserves another part of this Scribner-area congregation’s story.
Follow Hooper’s recovery from basement pumping in June to the return of library service reported in September.
Fire gutted Hooper’s school during classes in January 1908. What followed was six months of public argument about where to rebuild, settled by a vote of 295 to 125.
