Home Chapel
Adjacent to Wood National Cemetery, the 7,000-square foot Home Chapel has special meaning for veterans and the community. It has been a place of prayer, refuge, and true patriotism and has stood as silent sentry over the fallen.
It was constructed in 1889 by Wisconsin veterans and citizens with money raised from Soldiers Home Post Funds, personal donations, and Posthumous Funds. Fellow Civil War veteran and celebrated Milwaukee architect Henry Koch designed a Queen Anne style wood frame and shingle chapel with a steep roof with multiple gables, dormers, and turrets.
It opened September 22, 1889, as a multi-denominational chapel with seating for 600, one of the first such facilities built on federal government land and reportedly the first in Wisconsin.
The interior features separate appointments for Catholic and Protestant services and magnificent stained glass windows, with Tiffany-quality glass, each constructed with dedicatory insets near the bottom in memory of the various families and individuals who donated money to the Chapel.
As veterans of different religious affiliations continued to use the Chapel, housing was established near the Chapel for its chaplains. The Protestant Chaplain’s Quarters was erected in 1901 (Bldg. 16) and the Catholic Chaplain’s Quarters in 1909 (Bldg. 14).
One of the Chapel’s most prominent names is one of Wisconsin’s and America’s most prominent military chaplains, Gustav Stearns, the “fighting chaplain” of Wisconsin’s famed 32nd Division in World War I and Soldiers Home Chaplain from 1934 to 1947.
The Chapel also featured fresco wall murals of intricate vines, according to another famous Soldiers Home historian, prominent Wisconsin author Elizabeth Corbett—who published 40 books in the 1900s and grew up on the Soldiers Home grounds as daughter of a worker. These murals are being uncovered as part of Soldiers Home Foundation’s restoration efforts with a goal to reopen the veterans’ chapel for veteran funerals and community use by 2012.
