Black Sea Germans from Russia first settled in Fallon, a rural outpost in Morton County, North Dakota, in 1892. Adherents of the Roman Catholic faith, they were served by priests from nearby Saint Anthony until they built the church of Saints Peter and Paul in 1907. This imposing representation of the Sacred Heart of Jesus is believed to be an expression of the piety of an unidentified member of the German Russian community in Fallon.

North Dakota’s German Russians are descendants of colonists who moved from southwestern Germany to the Black Sea and Volga River regions of southern Russia and Ukraine during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Responding to promises from the Russian government of free land, the preservation of their language, and the liberty to practice their Protestant or Roman Catholic religions, German peasants established hundreds of colonies in these regions. Beginning in the 1870s, as authorities began to withdraw these privileges, some German Russians migrated again, this time to the United States, where they established German-speaking communities and family farms in the upper Midwest and elsewhere.

The German Russians brought a sculptural tradition in religious folk art from Europe. Elaborately decorated wrought-iron grave markers, generally in the form of crosses, can be seen in rural cemeteries in several areas of German Russian settlement in the upper Midwest. These often have a heart at their center, with radiating arrows or spokes. Although the representation of the Sacred Heart presented here is in wood, it is reminiscent of this sculptural tradition.

Among the practices of the Roman Catholic Church, veneration of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which originated in seventeenth-century France, is especially associated with private devotion. The Church encouraged the display of representations of the Sacred Heart in the home as an acknowledgment of the sovereignty of Christ over the family. Devotion to the Sacred Heart was known in the German Russian communities of North Dakota. The Benedictine community in Richardton, which provided teachers for the parish in Fallon from 1916 until its closing in 1963, was the priory of the Sacred Heart.

Gerard C. Wertkin, "Sacred Heart of Jesus," in Stacy C. Hollander, American Anthem: Masterworks from the American Folk Art Museum (New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with American Folk Art Museum, 2001), 360.