Enterprise ? Bethlehem Lutheran Church, named for Jesus’ birthplace by the Swedish immigrants who built it in the 19th century, has been only a memory in Dickinson County for more than two decades.

But during the holidays, the church’s cemetery still draws a steady stream of descendants of those who began settling along Swenson Creek in 1860.

“Although many of the community members have long since left the area, relatives come back at Christmastime to visit and frequently place wreaths at the graves of their ancestors,” said cemetery board treasurer Doug Lindahl.

The church, built in 1877, was torn down in 1982. The congregation was disbanded years earlier, in the mid-1950s, as its members moved away. A countywide tax brings in about $1,500 each year to support the cemetery.

Lindahl’s great-great-grandfather, Lars Olof Jaderborg, was one of the earliest settlers. Lindahl and his family still live in the farmstead built in 1873 by Jaderborg, who arrived 13 years before that.

On Thursday, Lindahl decorated Jaderborg’s grave, and others in the cemetery, with bouquets of poinsettias.

And before his visit, someone else already had decorated more than a dozen of the 100 grave sites with seasonal arrangements of evergreen and flowers.

“I’ll be making my own final pilgrimage here one day,” said Lindahl, who has already purchased his own burial plot in the cemetery.

“We all will, sooner or later. For now, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about these pilgrimages we continue to make here to this place to honor our ancestors,” he said.