Oh my Darling: Search for church arsonist continues

It didn't take long for the 120-year-old church to burn to ashes.

Until last month, Darling Lutheran Church was a well-known landmark in the central Minnesota township not far from Little Falls. Then someone set the fire that burned it down to its hand-hewn foundations.

While investigators search for the arsonist, visitors trek to Morrison County to mourn a lost piece of Darling Township history.

"I am just amazed at the people who have [gone] there and talked about it," said Dick Thelander, 85, who still tends the grounds of the church his grandfather helped build. "People, all religions, have gone there and looked it over."

Homesteaders raised the little timber frame church in this pine-shaded stretch of countryside in the 1890s, modeling it after the crisp white chapels back home in Sweden. It was where their children were married and where they were buried. Long after it closed its doors nearly 50 years ago, the church and steeple remained a roadside attraction along Hwy. 10.

"It's just always been there," Darling Township Supervisor George Zilka told the Star Tribune just after the fire.

Darling, population 600, was once a thriving little railroad town, but the church and a signpost along the rail tracks were the last reminders of busier times. Without the church, Zilka said, few people would realize they were passing through Darling at all.

"It was a landmark," Thelander said. "You go to Darling church, turn right or left."

Built long before automobiles or highways, Darling Lutheran gradually lost its congregation to bigger churches in nearby towns like Randall or Little Falls. The church held its last service in 1969 and then began to attract a flock of a different sort.

Curious tourists pushed open the unlocked doors, poked around, then left without closing the doors behind them. Vagrants camped inside, leaving graffiti and garbage behind.

"It was bad," said Thelander, whose parents were the first couple married in the church. "People just used and abused it."

And then there were the ghost hunters.

The would-be ghostbusters were a source of discomfort for a community raised on stories about the Kintop family's grief for Annie, and the long, fruitless search for her killer. Thelander's father remembered arriving for Sunday school at Darling Lutheran, only to be turned away by investigators who had found the murderer's bloody footprints inside.

Now the church, like Annie, is gone. The community had been preparing a fundraiser to repair the roof when the arsonist struck, Thelander said.

The Darling fire was the second church arson in Minnesota in the past year. Investigators are still searching for the person who set fire to the St. Mary's Catholic Church in Melrose in March 2016. The Minnesota Arson Reward Project is offering up to $5,000 for information leading to a conviction in the Darling case.

Anyone with information can contact the state fire marshal's hot line at 1-800-723-2020, or the Morrison County Sheriff's Office at 320-632-9233.

Mary Lynn Smith contributed to this report.