Although he did not realize it at the time, Robert W. Sebesta took on a monumental task when he began visiting rural churches around his former home of Yankton, South Dakota, in the early 2000s. His casual interest quickly became a mission to record their existence in photographs, and his collection of images grew as he returned numerous times to explore the entire state, with its varied people, religious denominations, and church architecture. The history of the congregations intrigued him as well, and he set out to create a book that related what he could discover about their past along with a visual record of those churches built before 1930 that survived into the first decades of
the 2000s.