WILLIAM H. LIGHTNER Our Mother of Sorrows Grotto (1929 – 1941)
Coral from Hawaii, petrified wood, lapidolite, white quartz, blue azurite, and rose quartz from Colorado and the Black Hills of South Dakota
1330 Elmhurst Dr NE Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 52402 (located on Mt. Mercy College campus)
Back in 1929, William Lightner’s construction company was constructing a building on the Mount Mercy campus, bored and looking for a way to honor his recent conversion to Catholicism after marrying his wife, Lightner set out on a twelve year journey to build Our Mother of Sorrows Grotto.
Per @mtmercy, William Lightner was a respected, self-taught architect, artist, and builder responsible for other major buildings in eastern Iowa — but this multi-structure Grotto site became his life’s work and an obsession.
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.
via mtmercy.edu
