The Martin Luther Prep School (MLPS) Class of 1984 held its 40-year class reunion in June of 2024. Doing my best to stay on brand, I arrived five months late and at the wrong place. The reunion was held in Milwaukee. Apparently, my classmates objected to the whole “prison vibe” of our former campus. After spending the night in my camper at the Super Walmart, I arrived early the next morning at what is now Prairie du Chien Correctional Institution. I parked along the street next to Hoffman Hall. If memory serves, we called this building Gym 1. It, along with the tennis courts and much of the open space along the western edge of campus, was partitioned off and transferred to the City of Prairie du Chien when the prison was established.
The view above was captured from the Hoffman Hall parking lot looking toward the former girls dorm.
I was struck by how much I liked the design of Hoffman Hall, something I failed to appreciate as a teenager. Built in 1962 while the campus was still owned by the Catholics and known as Campion Jesuit High School, it is a great example of 1960s Modernist architecture. I have no doubt it was expensive to design and build.
The beauty of Hoffman Hall stands in stark contrast to the music center on the other side of the prison fence. This building, designed and constructed with budget constraints never experienced while under Catholic control, is the only major structure built after the Lutherans purchased the campus. While functional—Professor Jaster gave me a tour of it in 1990—its featureless cinder block exterior made it look like it belonged on a prison campus even before it became part of a prison campus a few years later. If I’m remembering what Jaster told me correctly, the contractor who built the structure considered it so plain and utilitarian that he upgraded the front façade at his own expense.
Today, the small rooms that had once been used for individual piano practice are isolation cells used to segregate problem inmates. I imagine those prisoners feel much like I did as I sat in front of a piano in a similar room, albeit in this building’s dilapidated predecessor.
This campus dates back to 1880, when the land was gifted to an arm of the Catholic Church by a wealthy Prairie du Chien philanthropist. The school began as a college before becoming Campion Jesuit High School. During my time on campus under Lutheran ownership, I understood Campion to have been an exclusive boys school, but I never fully appreciated how prestigious it was. It attracted students from all over North America. The graduates of Campion include Vicente Fox, former President of Mexico, Pat Bowlen, former owner of the Denver Broncos, George Wendt, the actor who played "Norm" on Cheers, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the doctor who performed the first human organ transplant, a governor of Wisconsin, and Leo J. Ryan, the U.S. congressman who, after traveling to Guyana on a fact finding mission, holds the unfortunate distinction of being murdered on an airstrip just prior to the Jim Jones Massacre-Suicide.
As befitting the wealthy families that supported Campion, the campus featured its own bowling alley, radio station, shooting range, tennis courts, theater, coffee house, dual gymnasiums, and an Olympic-sized indoor swimming pool. Joyce Kilmer, the well-known Catholic American poet, wrote his most famous poem The Trees about the massive elm trees that blanketed the campus in the early twentieth century. By the time I was living on campus in the early 80s, these elm trees had been almost completely wiped out by Dutch elm disease.
Once the Lutherans took over, all of these amenities except the gyms and the pool complex were removed or locked away—at least during my time on campus. To their credit, the Lutherans did give us girls. I don’t know of a teenage boy who wouldn’t have made that trade. (That was indelicately phrased. No one was given girls. The school became co-ed.)
Campion came within five years of surviving for a century. The school shut down due to a lack of enrollment. The commonly accepted story among my classmates at the time was that the administration had alienated the wealthy families who supported it by deciding to admit “charity cases”. The wealthy pulled out, forcing Campion to close. Years later, I learned that this story was actually true—and more complicated. It was the late 60s/early 70s. There was fighting between conservative and liberal faculty members. There were issues with drugs and alcohol. (Wisconsin lowered the drinking age to 18 around this time.) And the charity cases being admitted were black.
Martin Luther Prep School lasted 15 years before it was closed and the campus sold to the Wisconsin Department of Corrections. Like Campion Jesuit High School before it, its demise was due to a lack of enrollment. Before purchasing the campus, the Lutherans (Wisconsin Synod Lutherans, to be specific) maintained a campus in Watertown, Wisconsin, that housed both a college and a high school. The Watertown campus was out of space, and some administrators of the high school reportedly didn’t like being shoehorned onto a college campus anyway, hence the 1979 purchase of the defunct Campion campus. The plan was to move the Watertown high school to the newly acquired campus in Prairie du Chien. This plan, which seemed like a perfect solution, failed to consider one important factor.
There is a phrase that all confessional Lutherans are taught from an early age: I like it the old way. (You got bonus points if you could say it with a German accent.) The high school on the Watertown campus was never shut down, and a significant percentage of its alumni refused to send their kids to the new campus in Prairie du Chien. They liked it the old way. At least this is the story as I’ve always understood it. As one might imagine, this was a politically sensitive topic and not openly discussed. (I wrote a story about the situation for the school newspaper during my senior year. It was censored out of existence.) So after 15 years of surviving on just over half the planned enrollment, it was MLPS that ended up getting shut down.
A wide asphalt path runs along the entire perimeter of the prison fence. Mounted to the fence at regular intervals are signs forbidding any sort of trespassing. Were these signs referring to the path, or everything that sat on the other side of the fence? Because I arrived at a location where the path ran between the prison fence and a public building, and then between the prison fence and a public road, the exact intent seemed ambiguous. This was clearly an FAFO situation. I decided to follow the path and see what happened.
I don't remember this part of campus being so beautiful. What I do distinctly remember is a classmate (Mike Vatthauer, I'm looking at you) slicing a golf ball into the side of a house on the other side of the street from here. One foot to the right and the ball would have gone through a window. That would have made for a great story though I'm sure the homeowner was happy to settle for a dimple in his siding.
When I added Prairie du Chien to my itinerary, I wondered whether or not I would experience any sense of nostalgia being on campus again (or at least proximate to campus). I still remember a fall afternoon when a few friends and I, sitting on the steps in front of the Marquette dorm, struck up a conversation with a small group of Campion grads who were wandering around campus reliving their high school years. After a few minutes of conversation, my classmate Mike Naumann slipped away, returning a short time later with an original Campion cafeteria tray for each of them. Mike had retrieved these trays from a stack in Campion Hall that had likely sat untouched for years.
How did Mike know they were there? How did Mike retrieve them from the hulking, condemned building that had been locked up tight since the purchase of the campus? Let’s just call it the magic of Mike Naumann. Locks were never much of an impediment to him. The Campion grads were delighted with Mike’s gift. As I stood outside of the prison fence thinking back to that fall afternoon in 1982, I found myself wishing for a similar experience. Needless to say, I did not come away from this visit with an MLPS cafeteria tray. And it turns out that razor wire is a real nostalgia killer.
Although this razor wire fence didn’t exist at the time, I have no doubt that a few of the tutors responsible for patrolling the boys dorm would have welcomed it. And I believe they would have named it The Mike Naumann Memorial Containment System.
It wouldn’t have worked.
The Wisconsin Department of Corrections initially turned the campus into a youth correctional facility for non-violent male offenders, which is what I thought it was as I wandered around. No, it is currently a minimum-security prison for adult men. It also operated as a medium-security facility for a time.
I only observed a small handful of people walking around inside the fence while I was outside of it. The grounds seemed largely deserted. Perhaps it was the time of day. The boys dorm was deserted. Literally. Only the girls dorm is currently in use.
Back in the day, I never had any idea what these buildings were used for. Now they are Buildings 1 and 2—and I still don't. They sit outside the prison fence so it is not clear who controls them. I wonder if they are considered historic for some reason. Regardless, I had to laugh at whoever left three cinder blocks sitting directly under one of the front windows. Apparently, they didn't want to make potential intruders work too hard to break in.
This photograph of Gym 2 and the former student union (note the bricked-over window) turned out to be the final image I captured of my former high school campus. The student union is now a guard station. The gym is used as the prison rec center. Campion Hall is long gone. Out-of-frame to the right, it has been replaced by a parking lot, a prison visitor center, and the main entrance gate. Although Campion Hall was never used while under Lutheran control, its aesthetic contribution to the campus was easy to appreciate now that it was missing. It was a beautiful old building that added visual weight to the campus landscape.
Maybe it was the fog or the time of day, but my FAFO plan had been working great. No one had noticed me as I wandered along the perimeter of the prison photographing the grounds—until now. Had I not lingered in front of the guard station to photograph Gym 2, I could have probably continued around to the east side of campus. Instead, Officer Howser emerged to find out what was going on. "Can I help you?" Howser asked.
While I wouldn’t call him friendly—he had more of a “What is this idiot doing?” vibe—we did chat for a while. After deciding I wasn't plotting a breakout, he started asking questions about what it was like to live on campus. "Probably not a lot different than now," I joked.
Howser told me that both Marquette and the chapel are scheduled for demolition. As he explained it, water got into Marquette and ruined the floors. Meanwhile, "birds ruined the chapel." I'm not sure how birds can ruin a chapel to the point where it needs to be demolished but it sounded like the Wisconsin Department of Corrections was doing a crack job of maintenance. What a shame.
After bidding farewell to Officer Howser, I decided to walk west from campus to the river. This was an area I spent quite a bit of time exploring back in the day. In the early 80s, it was largely undeveloped. What was there was run down. This is no longer true. Several blocks west of campus there is now a divided state highway that allows traffic on Highway 18 to bypass the city.
On the opposite side of the Highway 18 bypass, fifth wheels sit along the riverbank in what was once an unimproved mud and gravel expanse where people would pull their houseboats onto shore over the winter. It is now Big River Campground. My understanding is that over half of the sites are occupied year-round, which makes me wonder what happens in the spring when the ice breaks up and the Mississippi starts to rise. I’ve seen this area underwater.
A public boat launch and fishing pier have been built next to Big River Campground. The whole area has been transformed into a very scenic location, though the fact that it is adjacent to the water treatment plant becomes an issue when the wind is blowing in a particular direction. Speaking from experience.
My final stop before leaving Prairie du Chien was the Highway 18 bridge over the Mississippi River. I’m certain a bridge over the river existed in the early 80s, though I don’t remember whether it existed in its current form. The bridge is one and a half miles long, ending in the town of Marquette, Iowa, on the west side, and at a Wisconsin visitor center as one enters Prairie du Chien from Iowa. Halfway in between sits the creatively named Island Number One Hundred Seventy-Two.
I decided to walk the three miles from Prairie du Chien to Marquette and back, something I don't recommend to others as there is no sidewalk and often no shoulder where pedestrians can safely cross the bridge. I did it to take in the view of the Mississippi but I ended up finding Island Number One Hundred Seventy-Two the most interesting part of the walk. Fish & Wildlife is in the process of building an artificial slough on the island. It's already nice. I'll bet it attracts some interesting wildlife once it is complete.
If anything surprised me during my brief visit to a place that played such a major role in my formative years, it was not my old high school campus. I didn't know the details, but I knew it was a prison. It was Prairie du Chien itself. The city was unrecognizable to me. Yes, it had been decades since I was last here but I was still surprised by the fact that it felt so unfamiliar. Small towns with declining populations (more than 5,800 in 1990; less than 5,400 now) often function as time capsules. They don’t tend to attract new businesses and infrastructure improvements. No doubt the prison brought economic development, but someone explain to me how a town of less than 5,400 becomes a regional hub that has a Super Walmart (which replaced a completely different standard Walmart), a Tractor Supply, and a Cabelas.
As for the former MLPS campus, I had no expectations. I arrived knowing that it was the people, not the buildings that made it special. Yet after being there again, I realized that I still felt a sense of ownership over this place. I was disappointed that the buildings weren’t being maintained. I was irrationally annoyed that I couldn’t wander around the campus. So while it was interesting to see the campus again, I can't imagine that I will ever be back.
Correction (2025-04-06): Over the weekend, pastor, former seminary professor, and my roommate for our years at MLPS, Tom Kock, contacted me with a correction.
Tom let me know that Martin Luther Academy, the high school on the WELS campus in New Ulm, Minnesota, and Northwestern Lutheran Academy, a WELS Lutheran high school in Mobridge, South Dakota, were the two schools which were shut down and moved to Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. He did not recall any plan to shut down the high school in Watertown, Wisconsin.
I let Tom know that I thought the way I told the story was funnier and more interesting; and that I didn’t appreciate him trying to blow up two paragraphs of carefully constructed prose with his “facts”. When you include the phrase “at least this is the story as I’ve always understood it”, you can pretty much write whatever you want.
Nevertheless, this work is supposed to be nonfiction. It seems that I’ve had this wrong since 1982.
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©2024 Timothy Linn | www.tlinn.com
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