Ringsaker Church

The church in Ringsaker was built in the 12th century, possibly around the year 1150 or a little earlier. The Romanesque stone church originally had a long church design with a small choir and a large tower above the centre of the nave (the tower did not have a tall spire, however). In the late 1200s, the church was expanded and given a lot of Gothic features. The choir was enlarged to the east and the nave was expanded by adding transept wings to the north and south, creating a cruciform floor plan. Interestingly, the north wing is longer than the south wing. A large sacristy was built on the north side of the choir. In 1594, a man named Matz Tårnbygger built a spire on top of the stone tower. In 1652, Werner Olsen, the famous builder, constructed a new tower and spire. On 22 September 1669, the tower blew down in a storm. The church sat without a spire for many years until 1694 when Oluf Iversen Helmen built a new 64-metre (210 ft) tall spire.[3][4]

In 1814, this church served as an election church (Norwegian: valgkirke).[5][6] Together with more than 300 other parish churches across Norway, it was a polling station for elections to the 1814 Norwegian Constituent Assembly which wrote the Constitution of Norway. This was Norway's first national elections. Each church parish was a constituency that elected people called "electors" who later met together in each county to elect the representatives for the assembly that was to meet in Eidsvoll later that year.[5][7]

• List of churches in Hamar