Swedes, Danes and Finns: building the Upper Midwest
On the prairie of Henry County, Illinois, stands a two-story frame church built in 1848. Its basement and ground floor each hold ten rooms, once used as single-room apartments by colony residents; upstairs is the sanctuary with its original pews. It belonged to Bishop Hill, the religious community that the Swedish pietist Eric Janson and his followers founded in 1846. At its height about a thousand people lived there, among them a few Norwegians, including the wandering Cleng Peerson, who joined in 1847. The colony was dissolved in 1862, but its buildings survived, and the district became a National Historic Landmark in 1984. Many consider the Jansonist emigration the beginning of Swedish America.
Why the Swedes came
Sweden's population doubled between 1750 and 1850, from about 1.78 million to 3.58 million. Better health, fewer wars and more food were good news, but they produced a growing class of landless farm workers at the very moment when farm consolidation made land harder to own. Crop failures in 1867 and 1868 added hunger to frustration. Mina Anderson, who emigrated in 1890, put it in words many young Swedes would have recognized: she was "tired of hard work and disappointment."
Between 1845 and 1930, roughly 1.25 million Swedes came to the United States, and more of them settled in Minnesota than in any other state. In the 1880s alone, U.S. immigration records list 401,330 arrivals from Sweden. Religious minorities came too: Swedish Baptists, for example, settled in Isanti County, Minnesota.
Minnesota's Swedes, from Chisago County to Snoose Boulevard
A group of Swedes settled in Chisago County in 1851, and with colonies in Goodhue and Carver counties they formed the first three cores of Swedish Minnesota. Letters home with prepaid tickets did the rest. Hans Mattson, who had helped found the Vasa settlement in Goodhue County, became a land agent for the railroad and a Minnesota state immigration agent in Scandinavia. By 1890 nearly 100,000 Swedes lived in Minnesota, the largest number of Swedish immigrants in any state, and over the whole era more than a quarter of a million came.
In St. Paul, the first Swedes found shelter in a ravine along Phalen Creek in the late 1850s. It became known as Swede Hollow, and it kept that name long after the Swedes had moved up to Payne Avenue and Arlington Hills and Irish, Italian and Mexican families had taken their place. In Minneapolis the Cedar-Riverside area, home to Norwegians and Danes as well as Swedes, became the best-known Scandinavian neighborhood, and Cedar Avenue earned the nickname Snus gatan, Snoose Boulevard, after the chewing tobacco its residents favored. A Swede there in 1900 could buy groceries at Samuelson's Confectionery, worship at St. Ansgarius, watch a Swedish play at Dania Hall and see a Swedish doctor without leaving the neighborhood.
Young Swedish women found work as cooks, seamstresses and maids, and help-wanted advertisements sometimes asked for Swedes by name. Swedish men worked in the sawmills and flour mills, on the railroads and in the timber and mining camps of northern Minnesota, and helped build James J. Hill's Great Northern Railway.
Churches, colleges and hospitals
Swedish and Norwegian pastors founded the Scandinavian Augustana Synod in 1860; after the Norwegians left to form their own synods, it grew into the largest Swedish American religious body in the nation. The Swedes built institutions that outlived the immigrant era: Gustavus Adolphus College (1862), Bethel University (1871) and Minnehaha Academy (1913), Bethesda Hospital in St. Paul (1883) and Swedish Hospital in Minneapolis (1898). Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota traces its roots to the Vasa Children's Home, founded in 1865 by the Augustana pastor Eric Norelius.
The heritage is celebrated in public too. Svenskarnas Dag, Swedish Day, an annual celebration that began in 1934, is held each summer in Minnehaha Falls Park in Minneapolis, with a midsummer pole, folk dancing and the crowning of a Midsummer Queen. The American Swedish Institute was established in 1929 by Swan J. Turnblad, publisher of the newspaper Svenska Amerikanska Posten, who gave his Park Avenue mansion "to foster and preserve Swedish culture in America." In the 2000 census nearly 10 percent of Minnesotans claimed Swedish ancestry; in the 2024 American Community Survey, 354,188 did, 6.1 percent of the state, more than in any other state.
The Danes of western Iowa
Denmark sent fewer emigrants than its neighbors, because its economy was usually in better shape. Still, the U.S. records list 85,342 arrivals from Denmark in the 1880s. In Iowa, Danish immigrants began arriving in the 1870s and headed for the southwest of the state, where farmland was still available. Around Elk Horn and Kimballton, in Shelby and Audubon counties, they built what Iowa PBS describes as the largest rural community of Danish ancestry outside Denmark. It was once said you could live in Elk Horn for months without needing any language but Danish.
In 1976 the residents arranged for a windmill built in Denmark in 1848 to be shipped across the Atlantic and reassembled in Elk Horn as a memorial. Iowa PBS records that the National Danish American Immigrant Museum opened in Elk Horn in 1994. The Museum of Danish America in Elk Horn has collected artifacts and library materials since 1985 and holds more than 46,000 objects. In nearby Kimballton, a park displays a replica of Copenhagen's Little Mermaid. Iowa's Danes also published the Danish-language newspaper Dannevirke in Cedar Falls, and one of them, Christian K. Nelson, is credited with inventing the Eskimo Pie.
Some Danes only passed through. Danish converts to the Mormon church crossed Iowa between 1856 and 1860 as part of the handcart companies, pulling their belongings by hand from the end of the railroad at Coralville to Salt Lake City, more than 1,300 miles. Their mark shows in the data: in the 2024 American Community Survey, Utah has the highest share of Danish ancestry of any state, 3.67 percent, followed by Nebraska and Idaho, with Iowa fourth.
The Finns of Michigan's Copper Country
The Finnish story in America starts in the north of Norway. In 1864 the Quincy Mining Company of Hancock, Michigan, recruited about 20 Finns and 80 Norwegians from the copper mines of Finnmark. On 17 May 1865 a sailing ship left Trondheim with 30 more Norwegian Finns bound for the Quincy Mine; they landed in Quebec, took a lake steamer to Hancock and arrived on the eve of Juhannus, the Finnish midsummer. Only between 700 and 1,000 Norwegian Finns ever made the trip, but their letters home opened the way for everyone who followed.
Finland, then a grand duchy of the Russian Empire, gave its people reasons to go: famine from 1862 to 1868, a law of 1878 that made young men liable for service in the imperial army and navy, and a cycle of rural poverty in Ostrobothnia, the region most early emigrants came from. Between 1893 and 1920, 274,000 people emigrated from Finland, and 1902 was the peak year.
Calumet became the Finns' first nesting place in America. By 1880, Finns made up about one in five residents of the mining settlement around the village of Red Jacket, 1,800 of 9,000 people. In that same year the Finns of Calumet supported a newspaper, two churches, a mutual aid society, a literary society, a printing company, a lending library, a land company, two mining companies, and Finns also ran nine public saunas. In 1896 they founded Suomi College in Hancock, a seminary that later grew into Finlandia University. Their literacy surprised their neighbors: Oskar J. Larson, born in Oulu in 1871 and raised in Calumet, wrote in 1932 that "illiteracy in Finland is less than one per cent."
Many Finns preferred their own fields to the mine. Herman Hanka settled a homestead near Pelkie after he was injured in a copper mining accident in 1896; its 40 acres and eight buildings now form a museum of 1920s Finnish farm life. Samuel Mattila came from northern Finland at 16 in 1902 and in 1916 bought a farm in Toivola, a name that means "place of hope." Helmi Jokelainen, who arrived from Kemi in 1905, later ran a public sauna on Sixth Street in Calumet with her husband Pekka Aho, a lay preacher and musician whose voice survives in a 1938 recording by Alan Lomax. A Finnish saying sums up their ambition: oma tupa, oma lupa, one's own home, one's own freedom.
The Finnish American Heritage Center in Hancock, opened in 1990, holds what the National Park Service calls North America's most renowned archive and collections of Finnish American history. In the 2024 American Community Survey, 92,718 Minnesotans and 82,393 Michiganders reported Finnish ancestry, the two largest Finnish communities in the country.
The Norwegians who settled beside these families have their own chapter in Norwegian Americans: from the Restauration to the Red River, and the Swedes and Danes who went south are in Scandinavians in Texas. The overview of the series is at Scandinavians in America.