Scandinavians in Texas

Forty miles west of Waco, on Farm Road 182, a Lutheran church stands in the rolling hills of southwestern Bosque County. Our Savior's Lutheran Church was dedicated in 1878 by Norwegian farmers, and in its cemetery lies Cleng Peerson, the man Norwegians call the father of their emigration to America. The memorial on his grave says it was raised by grateful countrymen in Texas: "Takknemlige landsmænd i Texas reiste ham dette minde." In October 1982 King Olav V of Norway came to Norse to mark the 200th anniversary of Peerson's birth. It is a long way from Stavanger, and it is one of the proudest corners of Scandinavian America.

The Norwegians find their way to Texas

Norwegian settlement in Texas was never large, but it began early. The first known settler, Johannes Nordboe, was in his seventies when he came in 1841 to live with his wife and three sons on a farm near Dallas. In 1845 Johan Reinert Reiersen had land surveyed for a colony west of the Neches River in Henderson County, and other families settled in Van Zandt, Cherokee and Kaufman counties between 1846 and 1853. The 1850 census counted 105 Norwegian-born Texans.

Cleng Peerson came in 1850. That September the Norwegian-language newspaper Democraten in Racine, Wisconsin, printed his long article praising the Texas climate and the conditions for farming and livestock; he argued that the thousands of Norwegians in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa could find better land and weather in the south. He lived first in Dallas County. In 1853 malaria in Henderson and Kaufman counties drove the East Texas Norwegians to look for healthier homes, and Peerson, Ole Canuteson and Carl Engebretson Quaestad scouted along the Bosque River.

Bosque County: a landscape like eastern Norway

What they found was a rolling landscape that reminded them of eastern Norway. Bosque County was formed in February 1854, the state offered 320 acres to each family willing to settle there, and the Norwegians came that same year. Most settled in a triangle bounded by the towns of Clifton, Norse and Cranfills Gap. Among the first were the Questad, Ringness, Grimland and Dahl families, and Ole Ringness, son of Jens Ringness, invented the disc plow. Peerson himself was sixty-seven when he moved to Bosque County. The Texas legislature granted him 320 acres in recognition of his work, and he gave half to Ovee Colwick in exchange for a home. He lived with the Colwicks until his death on 16 December 1865.

The settlers built a community around a rock school, a few shops and the church, and they called it Norse. A post office opened in 1880. In the mid-1880s they founded the Norse Mutual Fire Insurance Company, a nonprofit shared-risk association that was so successful its directors had to limit membership to Scandinavian families living within twenty miles of Norse; it ran until 1984. Immigration to Norse continued until 1872. The census of 1860 counted 326 Norwegian-born people in Texas, and that of 1900 counted 1,356.

Paved roads eventually pulled business to bigger towns, and the post office closed in 1929. By the mid-1980s the church was the only public building left in what had been the largest and most successful Norwegian settlement in Texas. The descendants never stopped gathering. Each November since 1949, a Norwegian smorgasbord at Our Savior's has celebrated the heritage, and in 1975 the Norwegian Society of Texas was founded to preserve it. In the 1990 census, 94,096 Texans claimed Norwegian ancestry; in the 2024 American Community Survey, 144,346 did.

Swante Magnus Swenson and the Swedes of Austin

The Swedish chapter of Texas begins with one young man from Småland. Swante Magnus Swenson was born in 1816 in Barkeryd parish in Jönköping, in northern Småland, and left for America in 1836. Most accounts say his ship burned as it reached New York harbor and he came ashore with only the clothes he wore. He clerked in New York, kept books for a railroad in Baltimore and reached Texas in 1838, where he started out peddling goods from a carriage before taking over a plantation near Richmond. He became a friend and admirer of Sam Houston, who urged him to bring Swedes to settle the interior of Texas.

Swenson did exactly that. On a trip to Sweden in 1847 he offered to pay the passage of emigrants in exchange for a year of their labor, and in 1848 he brought 25 Swedes from Barkeryd parish, all related to each other or to him and his uncle, Swante Palm, who had joined him in 1844. By 1850 Swenson and Palm ran a store in Austin, and the newcomers moved with him to a large sheep and cattle ranch just east of the city. After the Civil War, Swenson, Palm and a brother in Sweden ran an informal immigration service that Texans called the Swedish pipeline. Swenson went on to become one of the largest landowners in Texas; his sons ran the SMS Ranches in West Texas and laid out the town of Stamford around 1899.

The pipeline worked. The census of 1880 counted 364 Swedes in Texas, that of 1900 counted 4,344, and many more came from Illinois and the other north central states between 1870 and 1900. Swedes were more numerous in Texas than in any other southern state. You can read their story on the map: Texas place names that the Handbook of Texas traces to Swedish settlement include Govalle, Lund, Manda, New Sweden, Swedonia, East Sweden, West Sweden, Palm Valley and Swensondale.

New Sweden, on Farm Road 973 five miles northeast of Manor in Travis County, began in 1873 as Knight's Ranch and took its new name when the New Sweden Lutheran Church was founded in 1876. A cotton gin followed in 1882 and a post office in 1887, and by 1900 the community had 104 residents. Seven miles east of Round Rock, the railroad town of Hutto drew German, Danish and Swedish farmers and had a Swedish church by 1896.

The Austin Swedes read their own newspaper, Texas-Posten, published in the city from 1896 to 1982. Texas Swedish Lutherans chartered Trinity Lutheran College in Round Rock on 22 March 1906, and Swedish Methodists opened Texas Wesleyan College in Austin in 1912. Both closed by the 1930s; Trinity merged into what became Texas Lutheran University in Seguin, and the proceeds from Texas Wesleyan funded scholarships for hundreds of children of Texas Swedish heritage. Among the notable Texas Swedes were Erik Jonsson, a co-founder of Texas Instruments and mayor of Dallas, and Carl G. Cromwell, the oilman who drilled the famous Santa Rita No. 1 well in 1923. In 1988, the festival New Sweden '88 marked 150 years since the first Swedish immigrants arrived in Texas, and King Carl XVI Gustaf and Queen Silvia of Sweden came for an official visit. In the 2024 American Community Survey, 138,321 Texans reported Swedish ancestry.

The Danes: from the Alamo to Danevang

Danes reached Texas as individuals long before any colony. Peter Johnson was captaining his own ships along the Texas coast by 1832, and a Dane named Charles Zanco died at the Alamo in 1836. H. P. N. Gammel arrived in Austin around 1878 and became state printer and one of the great book collectors of his time. In Fredericksburg, the blacksmith Christian Mathisen invented an early wind-powered electric generator.

The first organized group came after the Civil War, when two Texans promoting Central Texas farmland visited Denmark. Twenty families settled in the part of Burleson County that became Lee County in 1874, a district remembered as Little Denmark. They kept their kartofler and rødgrød, and the custom of coffee and pastry every day at ten in the morning and three in the afternoon.

The largest Danish settlement in Texas was Danevang, Danish Field, on State Highway 71 south of El Campo in Wharton County. In 1894 the Danish People's Society, Dansk Folkesamfund, bought land on the coastal plain and sold it to colonists for nine dollars an acre, as a church colony where Danish language and culture could be preserved. About seventy families arrived in the first year, many after years in the north central states. The beginning was brutal: the northern grains failed, the cattle died, the low plain flooded, and one young wife admitted that she "cried nearly every evening." Some families gave up; the Handbook of Texas says a number of them went to California and started the town of Solvang.

Those who stayed switched to cotton and organized almost everything as a cooperative. They founded a fire insurance company in 1897, their own telephone system in 1913 and the Danish Farmer's Cooperative Society in 1920, along with schools, reading clubs, a grocery, a cotton gin and a gasoline station. In 1896 the U.S. Weather Bureau appointed L. Henningsen as a cooperative observer, the first weather station in Wharton County; one recorder, Johanna Allenson, kept the daily rainfall and temperature for thirty-one years. Danish was used for regular church services until 1954, and the women's church society met in Danish until 1971. In 1923 the community had ninety-seven Danish families, and in 1994 Danevang celebrated its centennial with Danish food, music and dress. Of the Danes who came, the Handbook of Texas notes, only about 8 percent ever returned home. In the 2024 American Community Survey, 48,464 Texans reported Danish ancestry.

A Nordic road trip through Texas

If you live in Austin or are planning to, this history is close at hand. New Sweden lies five miles northeast of Manor, Hutto seven miles east of Round Rock, Norse forty miles west of Waco, and Danevang on State Highway 71 south of El Campo. Each one was built by families who arrived with very little and turned Texas land into farms, churches, schools and cooperatives of their own.

The Norwegians' path to Texas began in New York and the Midwest, told in Norwegian Americans: from the Restauration to the Red River. The Swedes, Danes and Finns of the north are in Swedes, Danes and Finns in the Midwest, and the overview of the series is at Scandinavians in America.