All rights reserved. Built between 1925 and 1931 by the German-born Father Matthias Wernerus and his parishioners, the remarkable Dickeyville Grotto features paths winding among giant monuments made of concrete inlaid with colored glass, precious minerals, shells, starfish, sea urchins, fragments of coral, bits of ceramic pottery, petrified wood, belt buckles and other objects.
Niches hold statues, mosaics, holy water fonts and giant vases with concrete flowers.
The Dickeyville Grotto is a metaphor of connectedness, of people to place and art to nature. Father Paul Dobberstein, builder of the Iowa grotto, was monomaniacal and single-minded. Dobberstein built his grotto out of exotic materials that he quarried himself. He went so far as to raid gems from geologically important sites like Carlsbad Caverns. Excluding mundane materials meant excluding the mundane lives of his parishioners from the great work.