Rebuilding Dickeyville Grotto & Shrines
Heritage Restoration spent five months performing meticulous repairs at the historic Dickeyville Grotto & Shrines. This project involved chemical cleaning of the twelve structures on the site's campus, replacement of missing and broken elements, and the repair of numerous stress cracks.
Project Overview
Heritage Restoration completed the major phase in the restoration of the historic Dickeyville Grotto and Shines. This stirring site consists of a man made prayer cave, hand crafted mosaic railings, and eleven shrines. Made using millions of stones, glass chunks, metal pieces, mosaic tiles, shards of pottery, and petrified wood, the Dickeyville Grotto is a marvel of meticulous detail and artistic design.
The grotto was designed and built by Fr. Mathias Wernerus, a German immigrant and Catholic priest who was assigned to the adjacent Holy Ghost church. Fr. Werernus created the grotto to address a need that he saw in his community. At the time, there was a prevailing view that those who were patriotic to America and those who were religious could not be compatible in society. Fr. Wernerus saw differently. To him, civic virtues and moral principles could and should coexist. Fr. Wernerus built the grotto compound to display scenes related to love of God and love of country to show just how compatible those two lifestyles were.
The grotto was completed in 1929, just two years before Fr. Wernerus' death. Nearly a century later, Heritage Restoration traveled to Dickeyville grotto to provide some much needed maintenance and repairs. The past decades had not been kind to the structures. Many shrines and alcoves were suffering from stress cracks and loss of adhesion. Countless small chunks had broken away from the surfaces, leaving unsightly holes in their wake. Mold infested innumerable cracks between the mosaic stones, and several marble statues had blackened with grime.
Heritage Restoration collected thousands of pounds of materials of various types and sizes, including the extinct form of opalescent glass that was available in Fr. Wernerus's day, and travled to Dickeyville Grotto. The first step in restoring the site was to perform a deep chemical cleaning to remove the fungal buildup. Next came a cleaning and straightening of the aging statues (some of which had sagged in the ground at odd angles). The last step was a five month long process of painstakingly replacing the missing rocks, porcelain pieces, semi-precious stones, glass chunks, and seashells.
With these repairs complete, the majority of the work has been finished to bring Dickeyville Grotto back to its original glory. This restoration project was under the purview of the Kohler Foundation, a charitable foundation dedicated to the preservation of historic monuments in Wisconsin and Illinois.
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