A Charmed World

Extra, Extra. Read all about it. "Immigrants Settle Norwegian Ridge"

Growing up on the family dairy farm in southeastern Minnesota, I nurtured an image of my agrarian Norwegian ancestors as wise and progressive people to have emigrated from Norway to America.  What I failed to appreciate in those days was that most of my ancestor immigrants were little more than children. A few studio portraits show them to be eighteen and nineteen-year-olds, wearing clothing that would have been considered neither new, fashionable nor costly for the time. 

They came to this country trusting in the letters written by the earlier Norwegian immigrants to America. My ancestors would have read letters that told them that the horrific American civil war was over at last. The letters would say, "The Indians have been moved farther west. There is good land here. I, myself have 160 acres that I got from the government for a mere filing fee. Hurry! Come now while there is still land to be had. You will have your own farm here!"  

Still, it must have been frightening for the young people to venture out on their first ocean voyage; many would make their berths on hay belowdecks. Perhaps once they'd reached land, they found themselves even more anxious about the journey? Passengers around them on the train spoke English and maybe there were a couple other languages, too, none of which they understood. They would communicate only with their Norwegian travel companions for those weeks on the water and while crossing the enormous landmass.

The travelers would have come to a small mountain range their first day on the train. While it looked nothing like their homeland, the topography of the Appalachians was likely rather pleasing, but all of that land was already taken. In my imagination, the vast plains that they crossed after the mountains were disheartening. They probably talked with each other about how flat the land was,  and how enormous the country was. They may have asked each other, "What do you think it'll be like in Minnesota?"

On a road approaching the Mississippi River, southern Houston County

I had failed to consider that most young immigrants never saw their families again, although that was the intention of many. Many came with so very little, perhaps only a small amount of money that the family had been able to scrape together to send them off to a world far away, and a slip of paper with the name of a Norwegian friend or relative that they should find when they arrived in Minnesota.

original Brevig homestead, est. 1870

Did they expect to be met by soil that was ready for planting? Or did they expect the reality that awaited them, heavily forested hills that required years of grubbing (cutting down trees and removing stumps) to make productive farms?  Could they have imagined that they might spend their first winter here in a cave alongside a creek? It was in an area of steeply wooded bluffs and lush valleys in Rooster/Yucatan Valley, in Black Hammer Township, where my great-grandfather Alf Amundsen Brevik and his young wife and infant daughter lived their first season in America. The story of that first winter was told me by my father, but whether they carved a small cave out of a sandstone cliff face or whether they found shelter in the much larger pre-existing cave is unknown. The "Catacombs of Yucatan" was the name given the cave that was there, with 272 feet of passages. It was used by the Oneota Indians in the 1600s. Either way, the Breviks would have been close to fresh creek water from a tributary on its way to the Root River before joining with the Mississippi River. 

Although immigrants came to America from many European nations, Norway was second only to Ireland in having the largest percentage of its population leave the homeland for America. "Between 1825 and 1925, nearly one million Norwegians left Norway, most of them going to America, and of those, the greatest majority went to Minnesota."

A valley of eastern Houston Co,

The first major wave of Norwegian immigrants within the Minnesota territory came in 1851, settling in the southeast, along the Mississippi River. These were primarily single young adults. Then, after the Homestead Act of 1862 was enacted in America, a second larger wave of immigrants came from Norway, many of them with their families.

A few communities were made up almost entirely of immigrants from one area of Norway. "For example, 1,135 of the 1,200-odd residents of Spring Grove, in Houston County, Minnesota were Norwegian by 1870; and the majority were from the Hallingdal region, northwest of Oslo."  Essentially, it was much like a village from Norway transplanting itself to a place more than 4,000 miles away. And later, yet a third major wave of immigrants came and pushed on to the Dakotas, California, and Alaska.

The part of Minnesota that was attractive to many Norwegian immigrants by the 1860s was an area that is now known as the Driftless Area. It includes southeastern Minnesota, southern Wisconsin, northeastern Iowa, and a small part of northwestern Illinois, all of which the glaciers circumvented. I was told decades ago by a first-generation descendant of those Norwegian immigrants that they chose to settle here because the bluff country reminded them of their homeland.

The town of Spring Grove is on the far horizon

Perhaps that is historically accurate, or perhaps it is that once we have something of our own, it is in our nature to decide that it is exactly what was wanted. Minnesota has no landscape comparable to Norway; there are no fiords or mountains. The Driftless Area is, however, picturesque with its forested bluffs and its creeks wending their way across Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin on their way to join the Mississippi River.

In communities like Decorah in Iowa, Westby in Wisconsin, and Spring Grove (originally known as Norwegian Ridge) in Minnesota, where the immigrants from Norway made up the bulk of the settlers, Norwegian continued to be spoken. Even well into the 1920s, sixty and seventy years after their grandparents emigrated, there were still children of Norwegian ancestry in rural areas of Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin that did not learn to speak English until they started to attend their one-room country schoolhouses. My mother was such a child. When she started first grade, another bilingual student interpreted for her.

Root River flows through this valley to the Mississippi. 

By 1920, most Norwegian-Americans had never seen their revered homeland but in spite of that, a shared heritage provided a glue that knit the people in Minnesota together. Children of rural Norwegian-Americans tended to marry other children of Norwegian-American heritage for decades. In fact, I remember quite well when in 1964, my sister's groom was not of Norwegian-American ancestry. It was a topic of conversation among the parents and grandparents. "He's 

German, you know." The response was usually something like, "Oh, ya, well I s'pose he's not from Spring Grove, den."