Look to your left and you will spot the Cathedral Church of Saint Paul, a striking Gothic structure built from rough, broken-faced red granite, anchored by a prominent square tower topped with four sharp stone pinnacles. We just left St. Ambrose Cathedral a few minutes ago, and now we are standing before the last surviving religious outpost of what was once known as Piety Hill. In the late nineteenth century, this dense four-block section of downtown housed eight different congregations. When their bells rang simultaneously on Sunday mornings, the resulting wall of sound was absolutely deafening, drawing thousands of people to this tiny area. It was a heavily concentrated neighborhood that occasionally hosted surprising interfaith moments. In 1893, the famous Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda visited Des Moines, attended a prayer meeting right here on Piety Hill, and publicly praised the earnestness of the local ministers.
But the story of St. Paul takes us back even further, to the gritty realities of 1854. Fort Des Moines had just been incorporated as a city, and its streets were little more than muddy wagon ruts. Starting a parish here took a serious leap of faith. In fact, early civic life was entirely makeshift. Because there were almost no finished buildings, the tiny original congregation of ten people had to hold their Sunday services in the old Polk County Courthouse. They shared this dusty public courtroom with several other denominations, operating on a ruthless, elbows-out, first-come, first-served basis. If your minister arrived late, your flock simply did not get to pray.
It took over thirty years of scraping by before they could finally complete this permanent building in 1885. The architect, William Foster, designed it in the Gothic Revival style. But the church leadership committee, known as the vestry, took a massive financial risk. Instead of hiring a professional construction firm, they acted as their own general contractors to keep costs down, directly hiring the masons and carpenters themselves. It was a high-stakes logistical puzzle, but their gamble paid off. The exterior walls you are looking at are load-bearing masonry, constructed from red granite laid in random ashlar. That just means the stones are cut into distinct blocks but arranged in an irregular, staggered pattern rather than perfect continuous rows.
If you look up at the tower, you are looking at the home of a massive twenty-five bell carillon, which is a musical instrument played via a keyboard, with a combined weight of over twelve thousand pounds. Inside, the cathedral guards an equally impressive artistic heritage. It holds what historians believe is the largest collection of its specific type of original nineteenth-century stained-glass windows anywhere in the United States.
This sanctuary has also witnessed quiet but profound cultural shifts. In 1976, S. Suzanne Peterson was ordained here as a deacon, becoming the first woman ordained in the Episcopal Diocese of Iowa. She bravely pursued her calling during a time of intense theological friction, eventually moving to South Africa where she made history again as the first woman licensed to minister as a priest in that region.
The stakes of building a city from scratch were incredibly high, and not every gamble ended in triumph. Let us walk about four minutes down the street to our next stop, First United Methodist Church, to visit the site where an early congregation faced devastating financial ruin, and see exactly what it took to survive.
