Norwegian Americans: from the Restauration to the Red River
The ship was small even by the standards of 1825: a 38-ton sloop that a group of families from the Stavanger region had bought for 1,800 speciedaler, loaded with iron as ballast and cargo: the Restauration. On 4 July 1825 it sailed with 52 people on board. The leader of the group, Lars Larsen Geilane, was a registered Quaker, and several of the others were Quaker sympathizers or Haugeans, both groups at odds with the Lutheran state church. They also wanted something simpler: a better living than Rogaland could give them.
The voyage took them past Cornwall to Madeira, where they found a cask of wine floating in the sea, and everyone on board tasted it; most of them ended up more or less drunk. From there the trade winds carried them across the Atlantic. On 9 October they sailed up the East River to Manhattan, 98 days after leaving home and one passenger richer: a baby girl had been born on the way. The American authorities promptly seized the ship and fined it, because it carried more passengers than the law allowed for its size. The emigrants appealed, and on 15 November President John Quincy Adams pardoned the skipper and waived the fine. The New York Quakers equipped the newcomers and helped them travel inland. The Erie Canal had just opened, and they bought land from a Quaker land agent in Murray Township, Orleans County, in the Kendall area near Lake Ontario.
In Norway the passengers are remembered as sluppefolket, the sloop people, and the Restauration as the Norwegian Mayflower, and on 4 July 2025 a replica sailed from Stavanger again, as part of Crossings, the national bicentennial of Norwegian emigration to North America.
Cleng Peerson, the man who kept walking
The man who met them in New York was Cleng Peerson. He had first crossed in 1821 on behalf of the Stavanger Quakers to find out what life in America really offered, went home in 1824 with a report and came back ahead of the sloop. He never stayed anywhere long. In 1833 he explored Illinois, and in 1834 and 1835 most of the Kendall settlers followed him to the Fox River in LaSalle County, west of Chicago. When regular emigration from Norway began in 1836, the Fox River settlement was where the newcomers headed, and the upper Midwest became the heartland of Norwegian America.
Peerson moved on to Shelby County in Missouri, to Sugar Creek in Lee County, Iowa, in 1839, and in 1847 to the Swedish colony at Bishop Hill in Illinois. In 1850 he went to Texas, where he spent his last years. Norway's national encyclopedia calls him the pioneer of Norwegian emigration to America, and estimates that the movement he helped start carried more than 800,000 people from Norway.
Why Norway emptied its valleys
Better farming had doubled Norway's population between 1750 and 1850, and the country's fickle growing conditions and short summers threatened famine. Many farm families rented plots that averaged only two acres. Then steamships put tens of thousands of shipbuilders, dockworkers and sailors out of work, while cheap grain from the continent undercut Norwegian farmers. The same steamships made the crossing faster and cheaper.
The decisive push came on paper. Letters from settlers, the so-called America letters, were read aloud and copied hundreds of times. The most famous was Ole Rynning's True Account of America, published in 1838, a short handbook that answered the questions every family asked: what land cost, which skills were in demand, whether the stories were true. Poisonous snakes were uncommon, Rynning assured his readers, and nobody would be sold into slavery. Unusually for an immigrant group, the first wave of Norwegians was almost evenly split between men and women. Whole families were coming, and they meant to stay. In proportion to its population, only Ireland lost more of its people to America.
Wisconsin: Muskego and Koshkonong
In 1839 John Nielsen Luraas led forty immigrants from Telemark to Muskego Lake, in what is now the Town of Norway in Racine County. The Muskego settlers founded the first Norwegian American newspaper, Nordlyset (The Northern Light), in 1847, and the first American congregation of the Norwegian Lutheran Church in 1843. Cholera struck between 1849 and 1851, and many survivors moved to the larger settlements at Koshkonong in Dane County and Jefferson Prairie in Rock County. Wisconsin held the largest Norwegian population of any state until 1870. In the 2024 American Community Survey, 352,188 Wisconsinites still reported Norwegian ancestry, 5.9 percent of the state.
Minnesota: the unofficial capital of Norwegian America
The first Norwegians reached southeastern Minnesota in 1851, after the treaties of Traverse des Sioux and Mendota, in which the Dakota ceded most of their territory. By 1857 almost 7,000 Norwegians lived in Minnesota. The Homestead Act of 1862 then offered 160 acres to any family willing to live on and farm the land for five years, and railroad companies sent agents to Norway promising farmland for less than two dollars an acre. To a family that had rented two acres, that was the chance of a lifetime.
Neighbors crossed together. By 1870, 1,135 of the roughly 1,200 people of Spring Grove in Houston County were Norwegian, most of them from the Hallingdal valley northwest of Oslo. These enclaves were known as bygds: settlements that kept the dialects, customs and even the social order of the valley at home. The Lutheran church was their center, and often their battleground. By 1865 Norwegian Americans had formed five separate Lutheran synods, and a former resident of Spring Grove joked in the 1970s that you could recognize a Norwegian settlement if "they saw two churches close together, preferably on opposite sides of the road." Whatever their synod, they were united by one shared irritation: most Yankees took them for Swedes.
The numbers grew fast. About 50,000 Norwegians lived in Minnesota in 1870 and more than 120,000 in 1880. By 1905 the figure passed 250,000, almost 45,000 of them in Minneapolis. Norwegian carpenters, masons and engineers helped build St. Paul and then Minneapolis, hundreds of Norwegian women worked as seamstresses and dressmakers, some of them, like Lina Christianson, in businesses of their own, and along Lake Superior, in communities such as Tofte, families combined small farms with seasonal fishing just as they had at home. By the late nineteenth century, Norwegians in the United States owned land worth about 650 million dollars, and a third of them lived in Minnesota.
The Red River Valley and the Dakotas
When good land in southern Minnesota ran out, the Norwegians moved northwest: to Alexandria, Fergus Falls and Thief River Falls, and from the mid-1870s into the Red River Valley on both sides of the Minnesota and North Dakota border. One of the first groups set out from Houston County in May 1870, three families and four single men in a train of prairie schooners, led by Olav Thortvedt. They had read the articles Paul Hjelm-Hansen wrote in 1869 to promote the valley. After a journey of four hundred miles on stagecoach roads and Red River oxcart trails, they found the valley floor too low for farming and nearly turned back, until the trader R. M. Probstfield at Georgetown showed them the higher land along the Buffalo River.
Thortvedt took the homestead in the middle of the colony, partly because he was the leader and partly because he owned the only grindstone, which every family needed almost daily for plows and axes. The Thortvedts gave themselves ten years: if no one else came, they would move on. Soon afterwards a surveyor arrived with news that the Northern Pacific Railroad would pass a few miles away. The line was finished in 1872, and settlers flooded in. Those who still wanted to farm after that largely went on into North Dakota. In the 2020 to 2024 Census estimates, one North Dakotan in five reports Norwegian ancestry.
Colleges, churches and the turn to English
The Norwegians invested early in learning. In 1857 the Norwegian Evangelical Lutheran Church in America decided to found a college; it opened on 1 September 1861 in a vacant parsonage at Halfway Creek, Wisconsin, with two teachers and 16 students, moved to Decorah, Iowa, in 1862 and graduated its first class in 1866. That school is Luther College. St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, was founded by Norwegian Lutheran immigrants in 1874. Every college the Norwegians founded in Minnesota was tied to a seminary.
The First World War pushed the community toward English. In 1917 Minnesota's Commission of Public Safety ordered teachers to instruct students in English only, and services in Norwegian declined steeply. Between 1915 and 1945, the share of Lutheran services in Minnesota held in English rose from 22 percent to 93 percent. In 1942 the Sons of Norway, the Minneapolis fraternal society, began printing its magazine in English.
The community had already celebrated its arrival. At the Norse-American Centennial in the Twin Cities in 1925, President Calvin Coolidge told a cheering crowd that Leif Erikson, not Columbus, had been the first to discover America, and a choir of schoolchildren in red, white and blue formed a living Norwegian flag, then turned their costumes inside out to become the Stars and Stripes.
The legacy in numbers
More than three quarters of a million Minnesotans called themselves Norwegian American in the 1990 census, a figure that rivals the total number of Norwegians who ever emigrated to the whole country. In the 2024 American Community Survey, 662,072 Minnesotans reported Norwegian ancestry, 11.4 percent of the state, and 3,864,701 Americans did nationwide. A statue of Leif Erikson has stood near the State Capitol in St. Paul since 1949, the state's football team is called the Vikings, and the date the Restauration reached New York, 9 October, has been Leif Erikson Day since 1964.
The Norwegian story continues in Texas, where Cleng Peerson spent his last years; it is told in Scandinavians in Texas. The Swedes, Danes and Finns who settled alongside the Norwegians are the subject of Swedes, Danes and Finns in the Midwest, and the whole series starts at Scandinavians in America.