But an 1879 court case in Holden Township led to both those outcomes, and triggered a public debate about married women's legal rights.

[1] In summer 1859, Lutheran minister Bernt Julius Muus and his wife Oline arrived in Goodhue County's Holden Township.

Muus was to serve Lutherans in Holden, located north of Kenyon in the midst of a growing Norwegian American community.

[1] Reverend Muus, deeply religious and uncompromising in matters of faith, impressed those who met him.

[1] Muus believed in education for the children of his parishioners, but preferred it to be based on his Lutheran standards.

[1] When Oline broke her leg in 1877 while pregnant with their sixth child, Bernt advised her to let "patience be your liniment."

In November 1878, the day her husband dedicated St. Olaf's Old Main building, their ailing twelve-year-old son died of typhus.

He also stopped her from going back to Norway to visit her family, saying that wives with such demands should be sent to St. Peter (an asylum for the insane).

In a time when a married woman's legal rights were still precarious, a wife's lawsuit against her clergyman husband stirred public interest.

A formal March 1881 meeting was held to determine if Oline should be ousted from the church for disobeying her husband.

An estimated one thousand people attended a February 1880 meeting held mainly to consider dismissing him.