Browerville, MN USDA Benefits

Browerville is a city in Todd County, Minnesota. The population was 790 at the time of the 2010 census. By the 2020 Decennial Census the population had increased to 839.

Browerville was platted in 1882, and named after Jacob V. Brower (1844–1905), a noted conservationist, father of both Itasca State Park and the Minnesota State Park system, and former Todd County official. Browerville was incorporated in 1884. Two properties in town are on the National Register of Historic Places: the Kahlert Mercantile Store, built in 1883, and the Church of St. Joseph, completed in 1909.

Despite being a largely Irish-, German- and Polish-American area of the State, a Rusyn farming community was also formed during the early 20th century in Browerville, by recent immigrants who had migrated West from the industrial cities in Pennsylvania. The building of a Byzantine Catholic parish church was proceeded by the founding of a chapter of the Greek Catholic Union of the USA.

In a 21 August 1912 open letter to the Amerikansky Russky Viestnik, the parishioners of Holy Trinity Greek Catholic Church in Browerville, known locally as “The Farmer’s Church” and which was being served by visiting priests from St John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Church in Minneapolis, announced that they had recently refused to surrender the parish and cemetery deeds to Pope Pius X’s newly appointed Greek Catholic Bishop of the United States, Kyr Soter Ortynsky. This was because the Byzantine Rite farmers of Browerville were Rusyns from Transcarpathia and members of the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church, and they accordingly viewed Bishop Soter, a member of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church from the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, as a foreigner. They intended instead to wait for a Rusyn Bishop to also be assigned in North America before surrendering the deed.

A regular pastor was never assigned, however. Tensions rose further in 1926, when the family of Michael Dorosh, inspired by Russophilia, converted to the Russian Orthodox Church and joined St. Mary’s Russian Orthodox Church in Holdingford, Minnesota. For a time, the Russian Orthodox priest from Holdingford would visit Browerville, which led to both Orthodox and Greek Catholics using Holy Trinity Church at different times. Most parishioners of Holy Trinity Church, however, eventually switched to the Roman Rite and mainly joined St. Peter’s Church, locally known as “the German church”, instead of converting to Orthodoxy.