Helen Crow has had a special fondness for the Prairie Dell church for 72 years.

It started when she was still Helen Johnson, just 16, and was riding in a Model T driven by Ivan Crow, who was a couple years older.

As they approached the church, the moonlight shining on its white clapboards, Ivan said: "I intend to marry in that church someday," she recalled in a 1986 interview about Prairie Dell.

She was astounded -- not by the suggestion of marriage -- but because she had the same thought about the church, although she lived several miles northeast, at Donovan.

It was strange because, for some reason lost to history, the Prairie Dell church was considered a bad luck place to be married. When Helen and Ivan exchanged vows there in a sunrise ceremony on August 28, 1935, theirs was just the second wedding in the 65-year-old house of worship. Their marital luck was excellent, holding for almost 50 years before Ivan died in 1985.

Several other weddings have been held in recent years -- probably the result of the efforts Helen and Ivan launched in 1974 to save their wedding place from the fate of most other wooden structures from 1870 Iroquois County.

More than three decades of efforts now have not only saved the structure Helen's great-grandfather helped build, but have placed it on the National Register of Historic Places.

The oldest church building in Iroquois County now joins 2,300 historic churches on that list of historic places, which totals 79,000 sites.

The building was fast deteriorating in 1974, when one of the big trees around it crashed onto the roof. Regular church services had long since ceased here and the Prairie Dell Cemetery Association, which owns the structure and the twin white clapboard outhouses that stand "out back," had no money to repair it and no insurance on it.

Helen and Ivan launched the Prairie Dell Church Restoration Fund, described in a 1974 article Helen wrote for The Daily Journal. The building was repaired and even painted for the first time in 30 years.

In the years since, the Crows and others who love the old church have raised money several times to repair and re-paint it -- holding ice cream socials, picnics and services by kerosene lamp light.

Still, in January 2002 it made another list -- the Illinois Landmarks Council's list of 10 most endangered historic sites.

Again, $7,000 was raised locally and the building was painted and repaired.

It is hoped that the national register status also will make Prairie Dell eligible for grants to assure its continued preservation.

Helen, now 89, put six months effort into the national resister application, preparing documentation and again writing out its history and description in her neat longhand.

Her great-grandfather Femer Cobb, a Quaker, came to Prairie Dell from Pine Village, Ind., east of Hoopeston when Iroquois County was still native prairie with "grass as high as the horses' bellies," she once wrote.

For $40, he and two other local farmers bought the meeting house site, which is three miles west of the Village of Iroquois on road 2150 N. They set up a sawmill, felled walnut trees and cut them into lumber to build the frame church.

Everyone, including women and children, helped clear the lot.

Mike Kane and Charlie Boone from Concord, as Iroquois was called in those days, donated their masonry skills.

The church was built in the Greek Revival style, designed by one of the group, perhaps Cobb, who was extremely bright though not formally educated. He taught himself to read and write, Helen said.

The building will be on the registry as a meeting house instead of a church because it was used by such a variety of itinerant pioneer preachers and congregations -- Quakers, Methodists, Catholics, Cambellites, United Brethren and Baptists,

Early on, the Methodists wanted to buy the building, but Cobb and other local farmers declined, wanting it to remain open to circuit riders of different faiths. In the 1890s, the itinerant ministers included quite a rarity -- Sadie McCoy, one of the few female preachers of her time, let alone circuit riding ones.

Helen appeared before an Illinois Preservation Agency Committee last summer with her research. It was a bit daunting, but entertaining, she said.

"One lady didn't think I adequately described the privy. She couldn't understand why it would have three holes," Helen said, laughing,.