Mount Mercy University is home to the Our Mother of Sorrows Grotto, which was built between 1929 and 1941. As of 2015, the Grotto is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
This virtual brings you to the grotto on the Mount Mercy campus. To claim the virtual, you will be looking for the bench overlooking the bridge feature of the grotto, featured in the photo above. The bench is on the north side of the bridge, made of 3 stone legs and several boards of wood. Contact me through my profile with your answer, do not include it in your log.
The following is required to claim this cache:
1) Please message me (NOT in your log) the answer to this question: How many wooden boards are used to create the bench?
2) Without giving away information for the above question, please attach a picture of you visiting the grotto to your log.
Logs that have not met the above requirements within 24 hours of logging will be deleted!
About the Grotto
William H. Lightner's Our Mother of Sorrows Grotto complex has anchored Mount Mercy University as a treasured and unique feature of the campus for nearly 100 years. It is a rare, remaining example of visionary architecture and the Midwestern grotto tradition of the early 20th century.
Lightner used exceptional visual design and building technique, as well as highly skilled stone inlay and Italian mosaic artistry, to create a large lagoon surrounded by five major structures—all dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Lightner was a respected, yet self-taught architect, artist, and builder responsible for other major buildings in Eastern Iowa. However, this multi-structure Grotto site became his life's work and an obsession.
From its beginning, the Grotto was a haven for reflection and meditation as well as a favorite location for college and community ceremonies. It became a neighborhood gathering place and a picturesque setting for weddings and pageants, including the annual May Day Celebration. The Grotto attracted as many as 700 visitors in one day during the 1946 Iowa State Centennial.
After Lightner’s death in 1968 there was little funding for the Sisters of Mercy to maintain the site and it fell into disrepair. A campaign to finance conservation began in the 1990's, and in 2001 a preservation grant from the Smithsonian Institution’s American Heritage Preservation Project, Save Outdoor Sculpture (SOS!), began the restoration process. Major grants from the Iowa Arts Council in 2011 and The National Endowment for the Arts ARTWORKS program helped complete the process in 2014, and as of 2015 the Grotto is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
History of the Grotto
In 1929, William Lightner's company was building Warde Hall at Mount Mercy Academy. During that time, Lightner felt called to create an extraordinary grotto environment to express his personal artistic vision and religious faith. What began in 1929 as a single structure built as homage to his conversion to Catholicism and a response to a request by the Sisters of Mercy, became a twelve-year multi-structure obsession. Perhaps one reason for the high interest in public artworks on the Mount Mercy University grounds relates to both the process and product of Lightner’s twelve-year odyssey designing and constructing the Our Mother (Lady) of Sorrows Grotto and park.
A professional boxer and skilled carpenter early in life, Lightner went on to become a partner in his family’s contracting business, Lightner Brothers Construction, and later president of the Master Builders of Iowa and the Iowa representative on the President's National Standardization Committee for the Hoover administration. Though Lightner also designed and built other significant structures in Eastern Iowa including Warde Hall on the Mount Mercy Campus (1923), St. Patrick’s Church in Cedar Rapids, and Lamoni’s first bank, the Our Mother (Lady) of Sorrows Grotto was Lightner’s life’s work and his artistic masterpiece.
Lightner began by building the two arched entryways. These were followed by a bridge surrounded by a lagoon, a ten-column structure representing the ten commandments, and a monumental central shrine, containing mosaics of the seven sorrow's of Christ's mother. The bridge was intended to represent his personal crossing to faith. The ten-column structure was the centerpiece of the lagoon, with each of the commandments inscribed on the base in mosaic. The huge central wall-shrine contained a niche holding a white marble statue of the Virgin Mary made from Carrara marble by the Italian sculptor Marcello Rebechini. The statue, now reinstalled on the site was originally installed in 1949 after the shrine's dedication by Archbishop Beckman in 1941.
On his quest to build the shrine, Lightner travelled more than 40,000 miles throughout the United States and Mexico looking for building materials. He contacted suppliers around the world in search of more than three-hundred unusual varieties of stones used in creating the structures. Over twelve-hundred tons of stones were used, at a personal cost of exceeding $40,000. The four structures still standing reveal Lightner's visionary sense of design, as well as providing a multitude of geological specimens, including coral from Hawaii, petrified wood, lapidolite, white quartz, blue azurite, and rose quartz from Colorado and the Black Hills of South Dakota.
Placed by a supporting member of the:
Virtual Rewards 4.0 - 2024-2025
This Virtual Cache is part of a limited release of Virtuals created between January 17, 2024 and January 17, 2025. Only 4,000 cache owners were given the opportunity to hide a Virtual Cache. Learn more about Virtual Rewards 4.0 on the Geocaching Blog.