Jacobs Prairie, Minnesota

Jacobs Prairie is an unincorporated community in Wakefield Township, Stearns County, Minnesota, United States.

Francis Xavier Pierz, who had submitted letters and advertisements to the major German-language newspapers across the United States, like Der Wahrheitsfreund (The Friend of Truth), and in Europe, urging "good, pious" German Catholics to venture to the Sauk River Valley of central Minnesota.

Pierz described the Sauk River Valley as a “land flowing with milk and honey” as well as safe from disease and anti-Catholic discrimination.

[3][5] Twenty years later in August 1877, during another locust outbreak, the parishioners again engaged in procession, processing from Jacobs Prairie to a chapel specially built "to secure relief from the damage done by the hordes of grasshoppers" some four miles away just outside of Cold Spring known as Maria Hilf (currently known as Assumption Chapel).

"[5] The establishment of individual parishes in Cold Spring, Richmond, and Rockville in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, plus the construction of a flour mill, brewery, and granite company in Cold Spring along the nearby Sauk River shifted populations and altered economic opportunities in Jacobs Prairie.

St. James Catholic Church cemetery, 2020
Map of Minnesota highlighting Stearns County