German Lutheran services were first established in Platteville in 1855 when a pair of German Lutheran pastors traveled through the village and noted its distinct lack of services for the community’s German Lutheran residents. The following year, members of the congregation donated funds, land and labor for the construction of the German Evangelical Lutheran Church of Peace. The building displays modest Gothic Revival detailing that includes a steeply-pitched roof; pointed-arch windows and belfry openings; heavy, curved wood mullions in the front tower window; and steeply-pitched gablets around the base of the spire. The German Evangelical Lutheran Church of Peace is Platteville’s oldest extant church building and is still in use as such today (the building is now owned by Platteville’s Free Methodist congregation).

Although the building has undergone a number of interior remodeling efforts through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as the construction of a side wing in 1940 to accommodate an ever-growing congregation, these alterations have not diminished the building’s architectural distinction as one of Platteville’s best representatives of early Gothic Revival church design.