Urban Life

Urban Life among Norwegian Americans

by David C. Mauk

Norwegians living in American cities were long a minority among their ethnic compatriots.

In 1880 only 15 percent of Norwegian Americans resided in urban areas (locations with 2,500 people or more). By 1930, nearly two-fifths (39.9 percent) of all Norwegian Americans lived in metropolitan areas of at least 50,000 inhabitants. Despite the group’s continuing urbanization, however, the 2007 American Community Survey revealed that more members of the group still lived in rural areas than was typical for Americans in general at that time.

Nonetheless, the movement of Norwegians to metropolitan areas over the last 130 years is impressive. In 1980, seven out of ten, and in 2010 almost three-quarters (74.9%) of Norwegian Americans lived in large metropolitan areas.1 In their urbanization, Norwegian Americans have become more and more like Americans as a whole. They live mostly in central cities of varying sizes or their suburbs.

Two Urban Communities: An Overview of Origins and Development

Especially in the nineteenth century, most of the settlements in cities originated because people either had specialized jobs that placed them in urban areas, or they changed their plans and decided to stay in town until they could earn the wherewithal to pursue goals in the countryside. Of course, residence in a city often became more permanent. And as time passed, increasing numbers joined the stream of urbanizing Americans. Thus Norwegian immigrants and their descendants established urban sub-cultures in cities large and small across the nation.

As Norway’s towns and cities grew in the late 1800s and 1900s, an increasing number of the immigrants left one of Norway’s cities for one of America’s. In the limited space of this essay two of the largest Norwegian-American city enclaves, those in New York City and Minneapolis, receive attention.

This drawing by Bernhard Berntsen depicts Norwegian immigrants arriving in New York. Vesterheim 1983.024.013—Museum Purchase.

The earliest small urban settlements appeared among Norwegian immigrants in the decades before the Civil War. From the nation’s independence into the 1850s, as New York grew into the country’s busiest port, increasing numbers of transient seamen from many nations frequented the dockside area of southeastern Manhattan. Because Norway was one of the world’s major shipping nations, a Norwegian community of maritime tradesmen and craftsmen, boardinghouse keepers, merchants, and professionals serving the homeland’s fleet grew up near Manhattan’s South Street Seaport.

This became the mother settlement that relocated to Brooklyn and grew much larger from the 1870s onward, as the city’s docks moved there. Large numbers of Norway’s sailors went on land nearby and made Brooklyn their home when its fleet suffered reversals due to the conversion to steam ships.

By 1910, grown to over 15,000 people, the colony had followed the construction of new docks southward in the borough to Sunset Park and Bay Ridge, which housed most of its business streets, churches, and residential areas. In 1930, census enumerators found nearly 63,000 Norwegians in the colony, whose size grew little during the decade of the Great Depression. Many of its residents, pooling resources during times of high unemployment, engaged in a lively artistic and debate culture that probed the deeper causes of their trying circumstances.

During the World War II years, when Nortraship, Norway’s fleet in exile, was located in New York, the Norwegian-born presence in the city ballooned temporarily, and wartime connections with local people brought the colony more immigrants in the 1950s. In that decade the majority of the colony’s population finally and decisively “went ashore” and moved away from the city’s coastal areas, deeper into the city or beyond it into the suburbs.2

In the later 1850s, small numbers of Norwegian working people, many of them young single adults, took work as semi- or unskilled labor in Minneapolis, the women mostly as domestic servants and the men as day laborers in various kinds of construction in the young boomtown. A very few men became shopkeepers or clerks.

Ministers visiting the town from rural districts in Illinois and Wisconsin founded the first Lutheran congregations in the community soon after the Civil War. Trinity and our Saviour’s Lutheran Churches opened their doors in the late 1860s. The faculty of Augsburg Seminary, which moved from a rural location only a few years later, came directly from prominent clerical circles in Norway.3

In the surges of immigration and urbanization that occurred from 1866 to 1873 and again from 1880-1893, the first two generations of Norwegian Americans in Minneapolis grew rapidly—in absolute numbers as well as a portion of the city’s entire population. A comparison of Norwegian and American records reveals the surprising finding that a large part of these migrants arrived after living in rural areas of the Upper Midwest. They adjusted to American conditions first in the countryside and urbanized as the second stage in their migration.

In Minneapolis the Norwegian community made up an imposing presence. In 1890 the group’s first two generations there contained about 30,500 people or 18.5 percent of the whole population. By 1910 these generations in the Mill City’s Norwegian community included over 34,000 residents, but comprised a considerably smaller 11.3 percent of its residents.

This altar formerly stood in Norwegian Seaman’s Church, 33 First Place, Brooklyn, New York. It is believed to have been carved by Thorvald Tobiassen sometime in the 1870s. Tobiassen, who took the name Thompson, emigrated to the United States from Lillesand, Norway. After arriving in the United States, he worked as a carpenter on a shipping wharf.

Vesterheim 1984.060.001—Gift of Frank and Bert Guido and Paolo Bennici.

Norwegian Seamen’s Mission Church in Brooklyn. Vesterheim Archives.

During the next twenty years its portion of the entire population changed little, dropping only by less than one point to 10.6 percent, which in 1930 amounted to an impressive 49,400 people. As late as 1960 to 1980, the portion of the city’s residents that reported Norwegian ancestry hovered close to 6 percent.4

Along with St Paul, Minneapolis has been recognized as Norwegian America’s “capital” since 1890. Thus it has been the preeminent site of the creation of the group’s public ethnic identity through celebrations at important jubilees, as well as the location of the national headquarters of institutions like the Lutheran church and fraternal organizations like the Sons and Daughters of Norway and the Lutheran Brotherhood (now Thrivent). These organizations and others gathered their members in Minneapolis from across the nation for conventions and meetings of leadership groups.

From the 1890s to the 1960s, Swedish Americans outnumbered Norwegians in Minneapolis, but from the 1990s the outward migration of Swedish-ancestry Americans and the in-migration of members of the Norwegian-ancestry group have made it the largest Scandinavian-American population in the metropolitan area.5

How They Got There: Motivations, Phases and Attitudes concerning Urban Migration

In hundreds of interviews, many conducted by this author in New York and Minneapolis, Norwegian Americans have explained how and why they left Norwegian or American rural areas for cities, and later for metropolitan districts across the United States. Economic motivations were most common in their accounts of leaving. Jobs—and people in Norwegian-American urban communities who could help them find employment— convinced them to make lives in the city.

The next most important reason for migrating to a city was the presence of relatives or friends there. The stories of the trip handed down through families from early in the 1900s are moving and still ring with the particulars that give them the resonance of detailed historical fact.

Recalling conversations with her mother in coastal southern Norway sixty some years earlier, for example, Lulu Lawrence explained that, since they had heard of so many Norwegian girls finding domestic work in Brooklyn, they agreed that Lulu should relieve the strained family economy by following them. Neighbors said they could put Lulu in contact with families in that borough of New York, and both mother and daughter hoped Lulu’s relocating there might also provide chances to find her father, who had disappeared in the city after writing home for a year. At fifteen Lulu carried out the plan, only to be returned home because an American law required that she be sixteen before she could immigrate on her own.

After conferring with her mother a year later, she took the trip alone again and became a maid for a Swedish immigrant couple in Brooklyn. A few years later she approached and walked by her father and his new “American” family on the avenue Norwegian-American Brooklynites called Lapskaus Boulevard (boulevard of Norwegian stew). Father and daughter exchanged glances, but said nothing. Thousands of young women took positions as domestics in the New York area from the later 1880s through the 1920s, making it by far the single largest occupation among unmarried Norwegian-born women in the city during those years.6

Others in the Brooklyn colony related narratives about fiancées or mothers and children taking ship voyages to New York to start or reunite with families there, after men formerly serving in the Norwegian merchant marine had gone on land in the city and secured a job and housing.

Paul Nord told how some of these seamen put personal advertisements in Norwegian magazines to attract wives from the homeland, saying they got engaged by mail and married on board a Norwegian America Line ship when it docked in Brooklyn, before beginning their lives together in the city. More maritime workers spoke of bringing families already established in Norway, or of coming because relatives or friends told them of the plentiful opportunities New York as a whole held for men used to making livings on the water.

The varieties of sea and port trades laid the foundation for a rapidly growing colony that included all the other occupations that could serve its needs. A grandson of Sigurd Arnesen recounted his father’s memory of being a small boy on board with his mother and siblings when their ship sailed into New York harbor. When they collected their belongings and were about to disembark where their father, a journalist for Nordisk Tidende, a local Norwegian-language newspaper, was waiting for them. It soon became evident, however, that his mother’s dentures were missing and only after a prolonged search were they able to meet his father without their mother “looking like an old woman.”

The elderly daughters of Theodore Kartevold, like the Arnesen heirs, explained how the training and experience their fathers or grandfathers had gained in Norway enabled them to enter partnerships with other immigrant entrepreneurs in Brooklyn. They opened storefront businesses in the colony business district, struggling for years, but eventually supporting the family and reaching community prominence.7

Those who arrived in Brooklyn in the post-World War II years often told anecdotes about coming to the city as workers for Nortraship as officers and crew on Norwegian ships that could not return to home ports. Later they returned to the city to settle because of relationships formed during the war years. Bjørn and Kitty Jakobsen, for example, met through socials that members of the local colony arranged so that crewmen in the Norwegian fleet could spend evenings with local women who understood their dangerous situation, homesickness, and homeland culture. So

Store Workers. Photo courtesy of the Norwegian-American

many Krigsseilere (wartime sailors) settled down in Brooklyn after serving in convoys to Europe during the war that they established two separate local associations to negotiate with the Norwegian government for veterans’ pensions—which, after a long period, they were granted.8

Economic motives for migrating to Minneapolis have, in many ways, resembled those of other inland cities. But the timing and nature of the large-scale expansion depended on the transformation of Minnesota and the eastern Dakotas into wheat growing farmland.

The city’s hinterland consisted of the entire Upper Midwest, which was also the region with the largest NorwegianAmerican population in the nation. An overwhelming part of the rural members of the group were involved in logging or agricultural pursuits that tied them to the flour milling firms and lumber companies in Minneapolis between the 1870s and the 1950s. Norwegian-American young people commuted seasonally between the countryside and the city, where urban surroundings offered men work in lumberyards, construction, and infrastructure and household and sewing work—and later nursing, office work, and teaching—for women.

Because of American customs that allowed them more limited roles on the farm, Norwegian-American women turned to the Mill City in great numbers. The growing mechanization of agriculture, moreover, made both them and their brothers less needed in the countryside. Young single women also helped support their rural families during repeated farming crises by working in Minneapolis. While there, they frequently established relationships, or long-term goals, that kept them in the urban setting.

Fewer Norwegian-American women than has been thought worked in the textile mills of Minneapolis. Although some worked in the Munsingware plant, most women engaged in making apparel had positions in small dress shops.9 Also, jobs in the flour mills of Minneapolis drew smaller numbers of the group’s men than has been thought, but many NorwegianAmerican men did work in metal and woodworking trades, such as barrel-making and steel framing and construction, which were related to the needs of the mills and meat processing houses.

Lloyd Hustvedt, telling about his work in a meat packing house in South St. Paul, explained that working in these industries often offered a way for farm boys to pay for higher education.

Geographical location, family connections, economic opportunity and, increasingly, educational goals prompted an exceptional number of Norwegian Americans to plan a stay of some years or a long term future in the Twin Cities or another of the big cities with a Norwegian-American community.

Members of branches of Norwegian-American Lutheranism came to Minneapolis to study theology at Augsburg Seminary from the mid-1870s onward and at Luther Seminary between 1922 and 1982. Serving at congregations across the region, the pastors who trained at these schools have taken memories of the cities with them and encouraged generations of young people to follow in their footsteps, as seminarians or as students with other academic plans. Augsburg College has remained in central Minneapolis and long ago developed into a four-year liberal arts college. Its nurturing of a distinctively NorwegianAmerican heritage has offered many of the younger generations the possibility of deepening connections with family and ethnic traditions.10

Since the late 1800s, the rapidly growing University of Minnesota has brought in many Norwegian Americans with secular ambitions from the countryside. It was the second state university—after Wisconsin—with a chair in Nordic languages and literature. This evolved into a well-known program in Scandinavian Studies that has attracted many students, not a few of them with Norwegian ancestry.

By the 1920s, students in the Twin Cities had found many connections to nearby Norwegian Lutheran congregations, such as Trinity Lutheran, the “cathedral” of the Free Church Lutherans attached to Augsburg Seminary and University Lutheran Church of Hope, Our Saviour’s, and other congregations in the United Lutheran Church.

From the 1880s onward, Norwegian students also formed secular social clubs on campus—from temperance cafes to debate and social clubs for people sharing their background or interest in Scandinavian Studies. Trinity served as the home congregation of students attending Augsburg College, which by the 1950s was a bigger part of the institution than the seminary. Likewise into the 1970s historically Norwegian churches near universities and colleges in New York, Chicago, and Seattle provided a religious home and community away from home for many who missed it.11

Phases of Community Development

To a degree, Norwegian immigration to urban or metropolitan areas presents a divergent history of Norwegian immigration to the United States. Seamen frequented New York and other ports earlier than 1825, when modern Norwegian migration is usually assumed to begin. They became immigrants through different, longer processes in east coast cities and later followed similar stages of transience, sojourning and eventually settling down to jobs on land and family life in Gulf Coast and then West Coast harbors.

Otherwise, urban settlement, often with very small beginnings around the time of the founding of cities like Minneapolis, took place later and involved fewer Norwegians

Trinity Norwegian Lutheran Church, Brooklyn, New York. Photo courtesy of the Norwegian-American Historical Association.

This Daughters of Norway convention badge was used by Rose Jurgensen Howardsen when she was president of the Anna Kolbjörnsdatter Lodge No. 36

Døttre af Norge (Daughters of Norway) in Chicago, Illinois.

It probably dates from the 1920s when many lodges were very active and used this type of ribbon. The inscription on the  front side reads,  “Anna Kolbjörnsdatter Loge No. 36

D. af N. Chicago, Ill.”

Vesterheim 2003.038.001--Gift of Donna Eichstaedt

than were involved in establishing the group’s hundreds of rural settlements. The historian John Jenswold analyzed the phases in the chronological and spatial development of urban settlement. He found that three distinct stages were commonly present—the bygd, the ethnic neighborhood, and geographic dispersal.12

What Jenswold termed the bygd stage only sometimes became the first component in a Norwegian community in a city. In this phase Norwegians from a local district sub-culture in Norway, a bygd culture, took up residence in or close to what later became a major city, and then attracted others from the same bygd to settle close by, so that, as the city grew, so did the translated sub-culture in one section of town. As is well known, similar processes occurred among Norwegians in rural farming districts and small towns.

In the Norwegian urban communities discussed here such bygd sub-cultures formed. The urban sub-culture cluster of Selbygg, from Selbu in Sør-Trøndelag county in middle Norway, appeared on the northern border of Minneapolis the year after the Civil War and migrated south toward the city center following jobs in logging— lumberyards lined the west bank of the Mississippi River near downtown in the 1870s and 1880s. In time it became the foundation for a strong working-class community of Trønder in the north side of the city, some of whose members in the 1890s established the Sons and Daughters of Norway. Even today the Sons of Norway is the ancestry group’s largest nationwide secular organization.

The Brooklyn colony’s bygd element grew from the concentration of boat building and seafaring traditions along the coast of Norway’s Rogaland and Agder counties. Many seamen from this region frequented the port of New York during the heyday of Norwegian white-sail shipping there in the 1870s and early 1880s. As the greater speed and efficiency of steam-powered ships increasingly drove sailing ships from the international cargo market, the bottom fell out of the Sørlansk maritime economy, and large numbers of its seamen relocated in the Brooklyn colony— where the Norwegian-born population quintupled in the 1880s.

So pervasive was the colony’s self-image as a mostly Sørlandsk community that even in 1928, when the largest local Norwegian-

language newspaper surveyed its subscribers’ origins in Norway, it reported surprise that the majority (55%) came, not from southern, but from eastern Norway, in districts of or around the nation’s capital.13

Jenswold asserted that the next phase of urban community building among Norwegian Americans appeared in the form of the Norse or Scandinavian working-class neighborhood, where immigrants found work, inexpensive housing, and group institutions that created a “hospitable cultural environment” within easy walking distance of each other. He traces the rise and expansion of the dense Norwegian settlement on the south side of Minneapolis from the outskirts of the central business district along Washington Avenue to the Cedar-Riverside section and on to the Franklin Avenue area further south.14

In My Minneapolis, the Norwegian-language newspaper editor and amateur local historian Carl G. O. Hansen presents a colorful portrait of Cedar-Riverside and the colony life there during the last fifteen years of the 1800s. As he describes it, the two commercial avenues that gave the district its name were lined with Norwegian immigrant shops that together supplied all the birth-to-death needs of compatriots. There was no need to patronize American or other immigrant businesses. Norwegian Americans could go to the people they trusted most, who employed Norwegians, and who best understood their traditions and tastes. Minutes away were the ethnic entrepreneurs—the biggest of which were Simonson Brothers and Newgord’s Sash and Door—that gave jobs to the largest groups of colony members at individual places of work.

Off Cedar and Riverside and near Franklin Avenue were the modest homes where families lived. Single men and some unmarried women lived in lodging houses on the commercial thoroughfares. Most of those women worked as cleaners or seamstresses and dressmakers. Every morning and evening in the district, residents could tell time by the “dinner pail parade” of local workers on the way to or from work. Most of a much larger group of single working women—domestic servants, cooks, and housekeepers—lived and worked in better areas of Minneapolis than Cedar-Riverside and frequented the colony’s central district on their half or whole day off.

Women did not frequent the plentiful bars and saloons along the avenues, but both married and single women were well represented indeed in the throngs that walked to the eight or so Lutheran churches in the neighborhood on Sundays. Local religious leaders nearly all opposed alcoholic drink, although some were for moderate use and others argued for forbidding its use entirely. The community divided vociferously on the issue. Unfortunately for the forces in favor of careful regulation or prohibition, Cedar-Riverside (the Sixth Ward) was represented on the city council between 1890 and 1910 by the pro-saloon Democratic Alderman Lars M. Rand, who, as long as he was in office, successfully prevented changes in city ordinances that weren’t in the saloonkeepers’ and their customers’ favor.15

The same section of town bustled with the activities of ethnic associations that met outside of the long working hours of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sports groups suiting the season, dramatic and musical societies, organizations working for causes such as women’s suffrage, home and foreign missions, and a wide spectrum of political, business, and workers’ clubs—these and more made the immigrant neighborhood hum with goaldirected energy. In addition, on patriotic ethnic occasions like the

Seventeenth of May and Leif Erikson’s Day, parades lined by deep standing crowds coursed through the immigrant quarter.16

The heyday of the ethnic neighborhood in the urban communities was also the characteristic life of a first settlement area, a place immigrants came to and stayed in for varying lengths of time after arrival. They had primary advantages— cheap housing, entry level jobs with high turnover, inexpensive entertainments with immigrants of a similar background. These advantages, however, were those of the bottom rungs of society, and most immigrants wanted to better their status. As soon as they were able, therefore, they relocated in other parts of town. In Red Hook and after it in Sunset Park in Brooklyn—the features presented above were the same.

In these places, the progress and prosperity of some, and the poverty and fragile security of the many, prompted the building of an impressive series of Norwegian-American hospitals, homes for the aged, and orphanages from one coast to the other between the late 1880s and World War I. In Brooklyn and Minneapolis, not one, but multiples of these institutions were funded, built and maintained. In addition, homes for girls and wayward boys, and summer camps for both, sprang up. The materially successful and professionals in the group were leaders in this cause, but the Lutheran church, its deaconesses, and individual congregations most of all aided in establishing these social services. Beyond that, however, the very populous nature of the urban colonies that contributed so greatly to the need for social institutions also provided the means to ameliorate those needs.17

The range of socioeconomic classes was wider in the metropolitan urban colonies and supported a cultural life equally various and disparate. High-class culture won respect. Norwegian American painters and sculptors of high quality found support for putting up statues of the homeland’s cultural heroes in prestigious places, such as Loring Park in Minneapolis. Exhibitions of Norwegian paintings and book signings by prominent Norwegian-American authors took place in Brooklyn and Minneapolis during both halves of the twentieth century.18

First in 1914, mostly in Norwegian, and then in 1925, mostly in English, Norwegian America celebrated centennials. At the hundredth anniversary of the Norwegian Constitution in 1914, leaders of the Association of the Regional Societies (the bygdelag)—although the organization was by nature rural itself,— arranged the biggest fete at the most central gathering point, Minneapolis-St. Paul. The New York colony also held a large celebratory affair. The most visible elected leaders of Norwegian extraction as well as prominent figures from Norway attended. The visiting notables from Norway stopped in New York as they travelled west.

In 1925, at the centennial of Norwegian immigration to the United States, again the bygdelag arranged the main celebrations at Minneapolis-St. Paul, and the ethnic elites in the other major urban colonies put on their own lavish events. This time the leader of Norway’s state church and the president of Norway’s parliament came, stopping in New York on their way to the Twin Cities. The crowning acknowledgment of the group was President and Mrs. Coolidge’s participation that included a motorcade through the flag-draped city center of Minneapolis and a presidential oration at the fair grounds, during which Coolidge remarked that Norwegians had in fact discovered democracy and America first, and therefore were Americans of the first class.19

Conclusion

By 1900, both of these urban enclaves entered the third stage of community development, community dispersion. To a small degree, it began among the privileged elites of New York and Minneapolis in the 1880s. The well-to-do had summer homes by cooling bodies of water, where wives and children often spent the summer. In the 1920s and after World War II, the exit from the old neighborhoods and the dispersal throughout the city and its suburbs gained speed. By the later 1950s and 1960s, the large majority of Norwegian Americans resided in the best parts of town, or in largely white suburbs. Most now attended church or went to Sons of Norway lodges closer to their residences.

A devoted core, on the other hand, stayed active in what had become inner-city congregations and central city organizations. They reoriented their faith and social activities to include outreach to the non-Norwegian cultural groups around them, even as they continued to treasure the traditions of their own cultural heritage. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, the average income of Norwegian Americans, both rural and urban, exceeded that of white Americans generally, and their residential patterns reflected that. The biggest and most successful social projects of the generations of Norwegian-American lives in the metropolitan areas remain visible in university hospitals like Fairview in Minneapolis and Lutheran Hospital in Brooklyn, in the buildings and bridges erected by Norwegian-American engineers, and in the inner city churches that have rededicated themselves to the more recently settled populations that surround them.20

Nurses at Norwegian Lutheran Deaconess Hospital in Minneapolis. Vesterheim Archives.

President and Mrs. Coolidge at the grandstand of Norse-American Centennial for presidential address, 1925. Vesterheim Archives.

Endnotes

1 Torben Grøngaard Jeppesen, Scandinavian Descendants in the United States: Ethnic Groups or Core Americans? (Odense: Odense City Museums and the author, 2011), 88-90. Odd S. Lovoll, The Promise Fulfilled, A Portrait of Norwegian Americans Today, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 14-15. The rural-urban data concerning Norwegian Americans for 1880, 1930, 2000, and 2010 was calculated on March 8, 2013, by Brandon Trampe of IPUMS-USA Steven Ruggles, J. Trent Alexander, Katie Genadek, Ronald Goeken, Matthew B. Schroeder, and Matthew Sobek. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS): Version 5.0 [Machinereadable database]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2010. U. S. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census, 1930: Population, 2 (Washington, D. C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1933), 232.

2 David C. Mauk, The Colony that Rose from the Sea: Norwegian Maritime Migration and Community in Brooklyn, 1850-1910 (Northfield, Minnesota: Norwegian-American Historical Association, 1997), 30-31, 43-44, 50-51, 57-58. Lovoll, Det løfterike landet, En Norskamerikansk historie (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1997), 201-203; Mauk, “Tests of Community and Triumphs of Cultural Solidarity” in Norwegians in New York, 1825-2000: Builders of City, Community and Culture, Liv Irene Myhre, ed., (New York: The Norwegian Immigration Association, Inc., 2000), 51-57.

3 U. S. Census, 1880, Volume 19, Report on the Social Statistics of Cities, Part II, Southern and Western States (Washington, D. C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1883), 687-695 and 696-702. David C. Mauk, “Norskdommens Høydepunkt: 1880-1914, the Golden Age of Norwegian immigrant Community in Minneapolis-St. Paul” in Norwegian-American Essays, Vol. XI (Oslo: Norwegian-American Historical Association Norway Chapter and The Norwegian Emigrant Museum, 2004), 185-187.

4 The Norwegian-American Historical Society’s Twin Cities History Project (TCHP), in cooperation with the North American Population Project, carried out systematic samples based on U.S. census manuscripts and analyzed published federal census reports to tabulate the size of the first two generations of Norwegian and Swedish immigrants (or these self-identified ancestry groups) in Minneapolis-St. Paul between 1880 and 1980. For a published table of findings through 1930, see David C. Mauk, “The Basis for Pan-Scandinavian Cooperation in Minneapolis-St. Paul: Nordic Involvement in American Politics Prior to 1930” in Philip J. Anderson and Dag Blanck, Eds., Norwegians and Swedes in the United States: Friends and Neighbors (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2012), 280.

5 Jeppesen, 22, 89. Twin Cities History Project (TCHP) census tabulations, 1880-1980.

6 Lulu (Jonassen Hansen) Larsen, interviewed by the author, February 9, 1986. See also women’s occupations discussed in Mauk, Colony, 184-185.

See the tables of women’s occupations in Brooklyn and the Twin Cities in David C. Mauk, “Finding their Way in the City: Norwegian Immigrant Women and Their Daughters in Urban Areas, 1880s-1920s” in Betty A. Bergland and Lori Ann Lahlum eds., Norwegian American Women: Migration, Communities and Identities (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2011), 119-154. See especially pages 138-139.

7 Mauk, The Colony, 44-60, 84-86, 153-154. Interviews with Paul and Ruth Qualben on May 5 and 13, 1986, and November 18, 1995; with Bertha and Gudrun Kartevold on December 28, 1985, and April 29, 1986, with Seamen’s Pastor Johannes Aardahl, November 18, 1986.

8 Interviews by the author with Kitty and Bjørn Jakobsen, May 24, 1986; John and Liva Nordskog, December 19, 1985; Alice and Daniel Fjelldal, October 25, 1985, and February 5, 1986; Sigurd and Synnøve Daasvand, September 3, 1986; and Sophie Jarnes, May 16, 1986.

9 TCHP census samples, 1880, 1900, and 1920. TCHP interview with Lloyd Hustvedt, November 19, 1998, and Hilda Kringstad and Sophie Karlsgott, March 26, 1999. David C. Mauk, “Finding their Way in the City: Norwegian Immigrant Women and Their Daughters in Urban Areas, 1880s-1920s.”

10 O. M. Norlie, History of the Norwegian People in America (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing, 1925), 269-293, 375-399. Carl H. Chrislock, From Fjord to Freeway: 100 Years, Augsburg College (Minneapolis: Augsburg College, 1969), 151, 170-178, 190. “Former President of UW Dies at 88,” Seattle Times, May 28, 2011; http://www.washington.edu; TCHP interviews with Robert Kvavik, November 4, 1999; Bruce Eldevik, October 2, 1998; Rev. Eugene Fevold, November 30, 1999; and Rev. Keith Olstad, March 16, 1999.

11 Chrislock, From Fjord to Freeway, 121-134, 223-225, 233-236. TCHP interviews with Carl H. Chrislock, May 16, 1999; Rev. Keith Olstad, March 16, 1999; Robert Kvavik, November 4, 1999; Bruce Eldevik, October 2, 1998; and Rev. Eugene Fevold, November 30, 1999. Mauk, “Norskdommens Høydepunkt, 185-197.

12 John R. Jenswold, “‘The Hidden Settlement’: Norwegian Americans Encounter the City: 1880-1930,” Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, University of Connecticut, 1990), 46-50. Odd Lovoll presents a similar typology of phases in The Promise Fulfilled, 98-99.

13 Mauk, The Colony, 31-35, 50-52, 55-58, 84, 214-215.

14 Jenswold, 46-47; Carl G. O.Hansen, My Minneapolis, A Chronicle of What Has Been Learned and Observed about the Norwegians in Minneapolis through One Hundred Years (Minneapolis: Author, 1955),145-152.

15 Hansen, 133-136.

16 Hansen, 26-27, 142-145, 259-261.

17 Norlie, 163, 430-433.

18 Lovoll, Det løfterike landet, 220-221, 241.

19 Lovoll, Det løfterike landet, 211-212, 223-225.

20 Jeppesen, 100-102. Lovoll, The Promise Fulfilled, 100-102.

About the Author

David C. Mauk, Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Oslo, is the author of numerous articles about Norwegian and Scandinavian migration and ethnic life, most recently in Norwegian American Women: Migration, Communities and Identities edited by Betty A. Bergland and Lori Ann Lahlum, and in Norwegians and Swedes in the United States: Friends and Neighbors, edited by Philip J. Anderson and Dag Blanck. Mauk’s books include The Colony that Rose from the Sea: Norwegian Maritime Migration and Community in Brooklyn, 1850-1910 and six editions of American Civilization, An Introduction (with John Oakland). His current project, The Heart of the Heartland, is a booklength study of Norwegian community history and interethnic relationships in Minneapolis-St. Paul between 1849 and 2000 that the Norwegian-American Historical Association and Minnesota Historical Society plan to publish in 2014 or 2015.