Scandinavians in America
In July 1825 a small sloop called the Restauration left Stavanger on Norway's west coast with 52 people on board. A baby girl was born during the crossing, so 53 stepped ashore in New York on 9 October, after 98 days at sea. They came from Rogaland, and they had come to stay. Norway counts that voyage as the start of its emigration to North America, and the date of their arrival has been celebrated as Leif Erikson Day since 1964.
What followed was one of the great movements of the nineteenth century. More than 800,000 people left Norway for America. Roughly 1.25 million Swedes crossed between 1845 and 1930. Danes and Finns came in smaller but determined numbers. In the 1880s alone, the U.S. immigration records list 401,330 arrivals from Sweden, 185,111 from Norway and 85,342 from Denmark. Most wanted what they could not get at home: land of their own.
They found it in the Upper Midwest. They broke the prairie in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa and the Dakotas, mined copper in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and built Lutheran churches, colleges and newspapers wherever they went. A smaller group carried the same ambition to Texas, to the rolling hills of Bosque County and the cotton land east of Austin.
The numbers: nearly ten million Nordic roots
In the 2024 American Community Survey, 3,864,701 people in the United States reported Norwegian ancestry, 3,251,869 Swedish, 1,110,484 Danish and 612,181 Finnish. Another 913,876 simply wrote Scandinavian. Added together, that is about 9.8 million answers. Since one person can name several ancestries, the number of people is somewhat lower, but the scale is clear.
| Ancestry | People in the U.S. (2024) | Share of the U.S. | Highest state share in the 2024 one-year survey |
|---|---|---|---|
| Norwegian | 3,864,701 | 1.14% | Minnesota, 11.43% |
| Swedish | 3,251,869 | 0.96% | Minnesota, 6.11% |
| Danish | 1,110,484 | 0.33% | Utah, 3.67% |
| Finnish | 612,181 | 0.18% | Minnesota, 1.60% |
| Scandinavian | 913,876 | 0.27% | Minnesota, 1.63% |
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 2024 one-year estimates, table B04006. Ancestry is self-reported. North Dakota is missing from the one-year table; in the 2020 to 2024 five-year estimates, 158,982 North Dakotans, one in five, report Norwegian ancestry.
Norwegian Americans: from the Restauration to the Red River
The Norwegian story begins with a restless scout. Cleng Peerson travelled to America in 1821 on behalf of the Quakers of Stavanger, met the Restauration in New York in 1825 and then kept moving west: to the Fox River in Illinois, to Missouri, to Iowa and finally to Texas. Behind him came the farmers. Muskego in Wisconsin was founded in 1839 by forty settlers from Telemark, and by 1857 almost 7,000 Norwegians lived in Minnesota. By 1905 there were more than 250,000, and the Twin Cities had become the unofficial capital of Norwegian America. The story runs from the bygds of southern Minnesota to the Red River Valley and the Dakotas.
Read the story of the Norwegian Americans
Swedes, Danes and Finns: building the Upper Midwest
Swedish America has a birthday of sorts: 1846, when the followers of Eric Janson founded Bishop Hill on the Illinois prairie. More Swedes eventually settled in Minnesota than in any other state, close to 300,000 of them, from the farms of Chisago County to Minneapolis's Snoose Boulevard. The Danes built Elk Horn and Kimballton in western Iowa, where a windmill built in Denmark in 1848 has stood since 1976. And the Finns made Michigan's Copper Country their landing place: by 1880 the Finns of Calumet supported a newspaper, two churches and a lending library, and Finns ran nine public saunas.
Read the story of the Swedes, Danes and Finns
Scandinavians in Texas: Bosque County, Austin and Danevang
Cleng Peerson's last journey took him to Texas, and he is buried there, in the churchyard at Norse in Bosque County, where King Olav V of Norway came to honor him in 1982. Swante Magnus Swenson, the first Swedish immigrant to Texas, brought 25 people from his home parish in 1848 and started a chain of migration that made Swedes more numerous in Texas than in any other southern state, many of them around Austin, New Sweden and Hutto. The Danes founded Danevang on the coastal plain in 1894 and ran it on cooperatives.
Read the story of the Scandinavians in Texas
Where the story can be seen
- Bishop Hill, Illinois: the Colony Church of 1848, part of a district listed as a National Historic Landmark in 1984.
- Minneapolis: the American Swedish Institute, founded in 1929 by the newspaper publisher Swan J. Turnblad in his Park Avenue mansion, and Svenskarnas Dag, the annual Swedish festival in Minnehaha Falls Park that began in 1934.
- Elk Horn, Iowa: the Danish windmill and the Museum of Danish America, which has collected since 1985 and holds more than 46,000 objects.
- Hancock, Michigan: the Finnish American Heritage Center, opened in 1990 and home to a leading archive of Finnish American history.
- Norse, Texas: Our Savior's Lutheran Church, dedicated in 1878, and the Norwegian smorgasbord held there every November since 1949.
They came with little more than their tools and a letter from someone who had gone ahead, and within a generation they owned their land and had built their own churches, colleges and cooperatives. If you are planning your own move to America, you are walking a road that millions of Nordic families walked first.
- Norwegian Americans: from the Restauration to the Red River
In 1825 a 38-ton sloop brought 52 Norwegians to New York. Within eighty years more than 250,000 Norwegians lived in Minnesota alone. - Swedes, Danes and Finns in the Midwest
From a prairie colony in Illinois to the copper mines of Michigan, the Swedes, Danes and Finns built churches, colleges and saunas across the Upper Midwest. - Scandinavians in Texas: Bosque County, Austin's Swedes and Danevang
Norwegians in the hills of Bosque County, Swedes east of Austin and Danes on the coastal plain: the Scandinavian chapter of Texas history.