L11 Scand Notes

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Lesson 11 examines emigration from Scandinavia. The picture on the slide showsthe house on the farm of the Kvaale family, who were immigrants from Norway. The building is part of the ten ethnic farmsteads that have been moved from their original sites and reconstructed at Old World Wisconsin, an outdoor museum in Eagle, Wisconsin, operated by the Wisconsin Historical Society.

Thomas J. Archdeacon, ©2011

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The principal Scandinavian nations are Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Iceland, which gained its independence in 1944, was ruled by Denmark in the era of mass migrations.

Finland is usually grouped with the Scandinavian nations. Many of the emigrants from Finland were Swedish speakers. The Finnish language, however, is not related to the Scandinavian tongues.

Between the end of the American Civil War and the outbreak of World War I, Sweden, the largest of the Scandinavian nations, sent the greatest number of people to the United States. Norway ranked second, with Denmark and Finland following. Most emigrants from Iceland’s tiny population went to Canada, with others going to the United States.


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The graph on the slide compares the emigration from Scandinavia with that from Germany. It illustrates that, despite the arrival of some Scandinavians in the United States before the Civil War, most of the immigration occurred after that conflict. In addition to sending many more people to America before the Civil War, Germany almost always produced more emigrants than the Scandinavian nations.


The graph on the slide shows common patterns in the emigrations from Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Migration from those nations had crests both in the 1880s and in the first decade of the twentieth century. The lull in migration during the 1890s reflected the effects of the Panic of 1893, which depressed the American economy. The outbreak of World War I in 1914 may have depressed the size of the emigration between 1911 and 1920.

The timing of Finnish migration was similar to that of Russia, its eastern Slavic neighbor, rather than to that of the rest of Scandinavia. Note the absence of significant Finnish emigration during the 1870s. Finnish migration hit its peak in the first two decades of the twentieth century. World War I probably had an even more profound effect on the late-starting Finnish emigration than on departures from the other Scandinavian nations.

4Thomas J. Archdeacon, ©2011

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Scandinavian historians have been strongly interested in the history of emigration from their nations. The existence of good records has helped them do creative work. Historians often turn to Scandinavian findings to illustrate general principles.

Scandinavian records make clear that, after the American Civil War, improvements in logistics and communications made migration easier. The introduction by the U.S. Post Office of the postal money order service in 1869 made the transfer of funds extremely safe and easy. Persons hoping to leave Europe often had the benefit of tickets sent to them by friends and family members who were already abroad. Use of prepaid tickets was not unique to the Scandinavians. They were also commonly used by the Irish and other groups.

The data on the slide indicate how common pre-paid tickets became by the turn of the twentieth century. The ticket reproduced on the right side of the slide shows that a resident of Wisconsin paid $269.93 in 1910 to bring six members of his family, including three adults and three children, all the way from Christiania, Norway, to Black River Falls. Until 1925, Christiania was the name of the city now called Oslo. The immigrants traveled by steamship to Quebec, Canada, and from there to Wisconsin by train. Adjacent to the ticket is a brochure for the Danish Thingvalla Line, one of the companies sailing from Christiania.


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Persons leaving Scandinavia could follow several different routes. Some took a Scandinavian vessel to Hull in England’s northeast, crossed by rail to Liverpool, and from there took a British or an American ship to the United States or Canada. For persons headed to the Middle West, landing at a Canadian port somewhat closer to the continent’s interior could be an advantage. For many Norwegians, Port Huron, Michigan, became the favored port for entering the United States. Scandinavians could also leave from the ports of the German cities of Bremen and Hamburg. Denmark’s Thingvalla Line offered the only direct connections between Scandinavia and the United States.


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Historians make several generalizations about the individual Scandinavian migrant groups. Sweden, the largest of the Scandinavian nations, sent the most immigrants to the United States. Norway lost the greatest proportion of its population. Denmark sent fewer emigrants than Norway or Sweden and lost the lowest ratio of its population. Most Icelandic emigrants went to Canada. Because Denmark ruled Iceland, Icelandic migrants were sometimes counted as Danes.

Historians sometimes describe an “Old Immigration” composed of peoples coming primarily from northern and western Europe, mostly before 1890, and a “New Immigration” coming primarily from southern and eastern Europe, mostly after that date. The Finns are hard to place in that system of categories. On the one hand, Finland is considered culturally closer to its western than to its eastern neighbors, and many Finnish emigrants were Swedish speakers. On the other hand, because of the late peak of Finnish emigration and because of the kinds of work the Finns pursued, some historians argue that their emigration has at least as much in common with the so-called “New Immigrant” nations to its east as it had with the Scandinavian states to its west.


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Whatever their origin, Scandinavians favored settlement in the Middle West. The graph on the left slide of the slide shows the states most favored by particular groups. More than a quarter of the Norwegian population found homes in Minnesota and almost 15 percent more in Wisconsin.

Swedes also favored Minnesota, and the map shows their areas of concentration in that state. The Swedes had a concentration in Illinois as well. Despite the reputation of Scandinavians as the European immigrants most likely to settle in rural areas, Swedes formed one of the largest ethnic groups in Chicago by the end of the nineteenth century.

The Danes were evenly spread across the Middle West. The graph on the left demonstrates a strong Finnish presence in Minnesota, but almost a third of the total Finnish population in 1900 lived in Michigan. Many were in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, engaged in the same kinds of work as their countrymen in nearby Minnesota.


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More than 600,000 Norwegians left their homeland in the five decades beginning with the 1870s. The most intense exodus occurred in the years between 1879 and 1893. In those years, the number leaving approximated two-thirds of the country’s growth by natural reproduction. Norwegians were in a position similar to many Germans; they were not impoverished, but the subdivision of lands had made prospects bleak for the futures of their families. Norwegians generally migrated from rural areas to rural areas. The picture on the slide shows a typical Norwegian farm in Wisconsin.


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The maps on the slide allow comparison of the concentrations of Norwegians and Germans in Wisconsin. Once again, the maps do not show absolute numbers. Counties colored darker shades do not necessarily have more people of the nationality in question that have counties colored lighter shades. The intensity of the color on each map represents, respectively, the ratio of the percentage of Norwegian or German residents of Wisconsin in a given county to the percentage of all Wisconsin residents in that county.

The most obvious difference between the distributions of the Norwegians and the Germans is tied to the respective timings of their immigrations to the state. Arriving before the Civil War, Germans made their greatest impact in the eastern half of the state. Arriving after the war, Norwegians filled in the western portion.


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Today, Wisconsin is home to the third largest block of people of Norwegian descent in the United States. They Norwegians, however, far behind the Germans in number of residents and also behind the Poles and the Irish. Although Wisconsin was not a particularly important center of Irish immigration, the great size of the Irish emigration enabled them to match the number of Norwegians in a state historically much more strongly associated with Scandinavians.

Wisconsin also served as an important base for two other western European groups of the mid-nineteenth century, natives of Belgium and Luxemburg. Their migrations, however, were quite small. Their movements, moreover, were similar in causation and timing to those from Germany. The Hmong, of course, are very recent arrivals in Wisconsin, having come to the state since the end of the war in Vietnam.


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More than a million Swedes left their homeland in the five decades beginning with the 1870s. By 1910, one out of every five persons born in Sweden was living in the United States. The migrants came mostly from the provinces south and west of Stockholm. Halland, Jönköping, Värmland, Kronoberg, Kalmar, and Alvsborg sent the largest numbers. Värmland was adjacent to the southeast and south central regions of Norway from which the greatest number of Norwegians left.

After the American Civil War, Swedish farmers were exposed to competition from American and Russian grain producers. The completion of a permanent telegraph connection across the Atlantic in 1866 helped exporters in the Western Hemisphere respond more quickly to changing market conditions in Europe. Vulnerable to greater competition, Swedish farmers experienced a fifty percent fall in the prices they could expect for the rye they had grown.

Agriculture was not the only sector of Sweden’s economy that suffered. Its famous iron and steel industries also felt pressure from competitors like Krupps in the rapidly industrializing German empire. Sweden likewise experienced problems in its lumber industry in the 1880s.


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Approximately 300,000 Danes emigrated in the half century before 1920. More than half of that figure left in the years between 1869 and 1893. Mormonism had spread rapidly in Scandinavia in the second half of the nineteenth century. As many as 20,000 of the departing Danes were converts to that religion. The Danish island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea, Lolland and Falster, the northern tip of Jutland, areas close to Germany, as well as Copenhagen and its environs produced the most emigrants.

Danish farmers fared better than agriculturalists in the other Scandinavian nations, in part because they turned to dairying. In an era when ice was the primary means of refrigeration, dairy products were less vulnerable to competition from distant countries. Denmark lost only one in twenty-five of its landowners, while Sweden lost one in four. In Denmark, artisans were the ones who most felt the pinch of competition from the goods of other nations. Therefore, city dwellers proved almost twice as likely as rural residents to emigrate.


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Approximately 300,000 Finns migrated in the half century before 1920, but emigration from Finland peaked later than emigration from the rest of Scandinavia. Many Finnish emigrants came from Swedish-speaking areas on the east coast of the Gulf of Bothnia, which separates Finland and Sweden. Uncharacteristically for Scandinavian emigration, but more in keeping with migration from eastern Europe, Finnish emigration consisted mainly of males.

The imbalanced sex ratio partly reflected the kinds of labor that became available to later emigrants. Much of it was in industry. The picture on the right side of the slide shows Finns engaged in mining, which became the means of livelihood for many of the men in the group.

Distilling pine tar had, along with agriculture, been the mainstay of the economy in the Bothnian regions. When the era of sailing ships faded after the mid-1800s, the demand for tar declined. As it had in other areas, a rapid rise in population also put tremendous pressure on Finnish farms, which became too small to support the families operating them.


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The latter half of the 19th century was a period of natural and economic hardships in Iceland. An eruption in the volcano Askja covered parts of the North East with poisonous ash and pumice. The picture on the right of the slide shows part of the aftermath. The subsidence of the volcano formed a caldera or large basin, which subsequently filled with water to form a lake.

A series of hard winters, cold summers, pack ice, violent winds, snow and sand storms caused poor harvests, erosion, and severe loss of livestock throughout the country. Unable to sustain themselves or their families, many residents left Iceland in search of a better life in the final decades of the nineteenth century. By 1914 around one fifth of all Icelanders had left the known hardships of Iceland’s farms and villages for the unknown hardships of life in the New World. Most went to Canada. Between ten and fifteen thousand went to the United States. Of those going to the United States, most settled in the Middle West, but converts to Mormonism headed to Utah.


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The picture shows the village of Vopnafjörður in 1881. As the map on the left of the slide shows, Vopnafjörður is on the northeast coast of Iceland. It was one of the largest ports of emigration from that country. In the picture, the ship farthest out had come to pick up emigrants. The Flash file shows levels of emigration from a series of Icelandic ports.


L11 Scand Notes

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