By Mark W. Olson

Carver County is often thought of as a county settled by Germans. While Germans did have a major role in our county’s development, Swedish immigrants also left their mark.

By the mid-1800s, Swedish settlers were clearing farm fields and creating communities such as Scandia (near Waconia), Gotaholm (near Watertown) and East Union and West Union (near Carver).

“It is one of the core counties of rural Swedish settlement in the state,” said Byron Nordstrom, a Gustavus Adolphus College professor of history and Scandinavian studies.

Migration

There are a few primary reasons for Swedish immigration to America.

One was conflict with Sweden’s state religion. Lutheranism was the official religion, and other religions were banned. Fines for practicing another religion were hefty, explained Roger McKnight, a Gustavus Adolphus professor of Swedish language and Scandinavian culture and literature. Three strikes of practicing another religion, and the offender was exiled from Sweden for three years.

Those who practiced other religions found free reign in America (and Carver County), starting churches such as the Scandia Baptist Church – which noted pioneer Andrew Peterson helped found, according to the book “Andrew Peterson and the Scandia Story by Jo Mihelich.

Immigrants also came to America for economic reasons, explained Linda Fransen, Cottonwood County Historical Society director, and one of the organizers of the American Swedish Institute’s “Swedish Life in the Twin Cities,” exhibit. With small farms and large families, Swedes “wanted the economic opportunities that they basically didn’t have in Sweden,” Fransen said.

The Homestead Act offered 160 acres to settlers – an attractive offer to early immigrants, McKnight said. “One-hundred and sixty acres for people who couldn’t vote and maybe had two acres of land to support a family, or no land at all, and were illiterate, had no chance of any upward mobility – 160 acres was a kingdom, and more than they could believe.”

Famine was another reason for the migration. In the late 1860s, there were several years of either too much rain or drought, resulting in failed crops. “There was literally mass starvation across the countryside,” McKnight said. “That was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

According to “Swedes in Minnesota,” by Anne Gillespie Lewis, “Almost 135,000 Swedes left their homes for the United States between 1863 and 1877, nearly 40 percent of them leaving in 1868 and 1869 after severe crop failures brought widespread hunger.”

So what started in the 1850s as small Swedish groups or families moving to America evolved into a mass migration.

The numbers were bolstered by immigration bureaus in states like Minnesota and Wisconsin. “They sent recruiters to Scandinavia to actively recruit immigrant (labor) to fill up farmlands, work on railroads, etc.,” McKnight said.

Swedes arrive

The 1857 U.S. census included almost 500 Swedish immigrants in Carver County, a number that had grown to 900 by the 1860 census, according to the Carver County Historical Society booklet, “In the Tracks of the Swedish Settlers in Carver County.” By 1885, the Minnesota census counted about 206 Swedish-born residents in the city of Carver alone – almost one-third of the village’s population.

“In the 19th century (Carver) became one of the doorways through which Swedish culture, education and religion arrived and took hold in Minnesota,” noted Carver historian John von Walter in his Swedish Genealogical Society of Minnesota article “King Oscar’s Settlement.”

This was most apparent just a few miles west of Carver, with the founding of East Union and then West Union, a few of the earliest Lutheran churches in Minnesota. (It would be almost 50 years before the East Union services were given in English, according to von Walter.)

St. Ansgar’s Academy operated next to East Union Lutheran Church from 1863 until 1876, before it was moved to St. Peter and became Gustavus Adolphus College. St. Ansgar’s original purpose was to prepare students for seminary. The Swedish state church refused to send ministers to Swedish churches in America, McKnight said, so ministers were in demand.

Immigrant’s tale

Much of the day-to-day life of the Swedish immigrant was recorded by Andrew Peterson over the course of 44 years of living in Carver County.

In 1948, author Vilhelm Moberg arrived in the Unites States to research the immigrant experience. He used Peterson’s diaries, kept at the Minnesota Historical Society, as an outline for his series of four novels about Swedish immigrants. “The symbolic aspects of the novel don’t trace back to Peterson, but the skeletal outline does,” said McKnight, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Peterson and Moberg.

Oddly, Peterson never outlined his reasons for coming to America, McKnight said. “Peterson never said a lot about himself.”

 “Peterson wasn’t a starving immigrant. He was a reasonably successful small-town farmer in Sweden.” However, Peterson’s farm wasn’t highly fertile or prosperous, and McKnight assumes he came to America for economic benefit.

Moberg’s recounting of the immigrant experience captured the imagination of Sweden, McKnight said. “The whole idea of this Swedish immigrant experience is an immensely romantic tale. Of course, people aren’t stupid. They realize there was a lot of suffering and economic hardship, and sometimes even death, but it’s a terribly heroic, larger-than-life epic,” McKnight said.

Moberg argued that Swedish history was only written about the upper class, because they were the ones doing the writing. Meanwhile, “the common people had been ignored, because they were illiterate,” McKnight said. Similarly, the mass migration of Swedes had been ignored.

“He created a story in which the unlettered masses made history, and without a significant leader, without a great hero leading the way, without a Napoleon or George Washington,” McKnight said.