St. Augusta, MN USDA Benefits

Saint Augusta or St. Augusta, formerly named Ventura, is a city in Stearns County, Minnesota, United States, directly south of the city of St. Cloud. The population was 3,497 at the 2020 census.

St. Augusta is part of the Saint Cloud Metropolitan Statistical Area.

Writing in 1997, Jewish-American historian of America’s religious architecture Marilyn J. Chiat described the early history of the region as follows, “Father Francis X. Pierz, a missionary to Indians in central Minnesota, published a series of articles in 1851 in German Catholic newspapers advocating Catholic settlement in central Minnesota. Large numbers of immigrants, mainly German, but also Slovenian and Polish, responded. Over 20 parishes where formed in what is now Stearns County, each centered on a church-oriented hamlet. As the farmers prospered, the small frame churches were replaced by more substantial buildings of brick or stone such as St. Mary, Help of Christians, a Gothic Revival stone structure built in 1873. Stearns County retains in its German character and is still home to one of the largest rural Catholic populations in Anglo-America.”

St. Augusta received its name because Fr. Pierz accidentally found a German language holy card dedicated to St. Augustine lying in a nearby field. At his suggestion, the town was named for the Saint, although the city’s name was somehow garbled in the process. The original holy card, however, is still preserved in the parish archives.

Similarly to many other Stearns County German communities, the early settlers of St. Augusta included at least one Catholic family of German Jewish descent. The family patriarch was Baldassar Mayer (1816-1890), a native of the Grand Duchy of Baden. Raised in Orthodox Judaism Mayer had converted to Roman Catholicism before his marriage to Dutch-American Gentile Elizabeth Hagedorn in Mercer County, Ohio. From the time of their first arrival in 1865, the Mayer family was very heavily involved in St. Mary, Help of Christians Parish, and Baldassar Mayer helped build the current church building during the early 1870s. He always retained, however, a very strong sense of pride in his Jewish ancestry and, shortly before his death on 4 July 1890, Mayer asked for his kippah, sat up in his deathbed, and sang two traditional blessings from the Hebrew Bible over his assembled family: Eshet Ḥayil (Hebrew: אשת חיל, “Woman of Valor”) Book of Proverbs Chapter 31 Verses 10–31, over his wife, and Birkut Kohanim (Hebrew: ברכת כהנים, “Priestly Blessing”), Book of Numbers Chapter 6 Verses 23-27, over their many children and grandchildren.