When John Nelson Luraas and his fellow immigrants arrived in Milwaukee, residents recommended that they head southwest twenty-five miles to unclaimed land. The dried-out August marshlands looked like fertile fields, with grasses so tall that a man could get lost in them. They looked like the rich farmland at home along the craggy Norwegian coast.They mistakenly built their cabins on swamplands. In the spring, their cabins were water-logged; by summer, malaria-carrying mosquitos rendered the colonists weak and unable to work. Crossing the bridge over the outflow of Big Muskego Lake near where Luraas settled, even today it is evident that hard work doesn’t always guarantee dry and tillable soil, no matter how much tiling and draining is done.After four years at Muskego, Luraas and his suffering family had had enough. They loaded their ox cart and moved to Koshkonong. They prospered as the first settlers of the Town of Dunkirk in Dane County.
The rich Norwegian lumberman, Tollef Bache, was a Haugean who dreamed of starting a religious colony in America. He sent his son, Søren Bache and a trusted employee, Johannes Johannsen, to America with a strongbox stuffed with silver to buy land. The Haugen lay preacher Elling Ellingson was their traveling companion as they went to the Fox River settlement near Ottawa, Illinois to learn more about America from their fellow Norwegians.In 1838, Bache and Johannsen wandered around northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin looking for available land. They settled on the isthmus between Wind Lake and Lake Waubeesa. Like many pioneer settlers, with the aid of newcomer Even Heg, they dug into the side of a hill and added a three-sided log structure to the front. Going to Milwaukee for supplies, Bache and Johannsen started a trading post, where settlers could barter butter, eggs and other farm crops for flour, coffee, sugar, fabric, buttons and other items which couldn’t be made at home. Like other pioneer convenience stores, it became the center of the community, where in winter or on rainy days, men would sit around a pot-bellied stove, smoke their pipes and tell tall tales.Much of Tollef Bache’s money was used to make farm loans to other Norwegians in Muskego, Koshkonong and the Fox River settlement. Søren returned to Norway to get more funds. When he returned, while trying to collect money owed him, he accidently shot and killed the wife of a man who he had loaned money to. Not long after, his mentor Johan Johannsen, died at age 43. Søren was lost without Johannsen’s guidance. Søren’s father Tolef was on his deathbed, so Søren returned to Norway, never to return to America. James Denoon Reymert oversaw Bache’s remaining financial interests in Wisconsin.
So many Norwegians came to the area, that when it was time to name the new township surrounding Wind Lake, people voted to name it the Town of Norway. James Denoon Reymert was an important early member of the settlement. He was born in the British Isles to a Scottish mother and Norwegian father. His parents moved to Norway where his father ran a sailing fleet transporting Norwegian timber to Britain. As a young adult, Reymert clerked in a British law firm, then emigrated to America at age twenty-one with only a few dollars in his pockets. Having some knowledge of law and being able to speak English gave him an edge over other Norwegian immigrants. Fellow settlers elected Reymert as their representative to the 1846 and 1848 state constitutional conventions. When Wisconsin became a state, Reymert was voted in as a state assemblyman. He was the first Norwegian to hold a public office in Wisconsin. Reymert planned a booming village at the crossroads between Lake Denoon (named after his mother) and the Muskego Dam Road, with easy access to the Indian trail which later became Loomis Road, the quickest and most direct path to Milwaukee. A fire burned down his home, which also served as a hotel. Cholera in Muskego-Norway in the 1850s kept newcomers away from the area and the boom he hoped for did not materialize.
Even Heg was a successful innkeeper in Lier, Norway. His neighbors in Lier thought he was crazy when he sold his property and took his family to America. As a Haugean, Heg savored the religious freedom that America offered. Even Heg was a natural leader. He first met Reymert, Bache and Johannesen in America. These four quickly bonded and worked together to build a colony at Muskego-Norway. Heg rallied the community to help build a large barn. The largest structure in the area, Heg’s barn was used as a community center. More than a thousand immigrants sheltered there on their first stop in Wisconsin. After resting from their arduous journey, many found work helping with fall harvests, at Denoon’s sawmill or helping build the plank road from Wind Lake to Rochester. Heg’s barn served as a hospital during epidemics. Eventually, another structure was built on the edge of the settlement to quarantine stricken settlers.Heg, Johannesen, Bache and Reymert worked together to buy a printing press in Philadelphia, which they moved to Heg’s home. His son, Hans, helped work the press lever and feed in paper, creating the Nordlyset, the first Norwegian language newspaper in America. Nordlyset takes its names from the Norwegian word for “Northern lights,” the beautiful, colorful aurora borealis in the northern sky. They used the paper to illuminate their fellow countrymen about America, its institutions and politics and to share news from their homeland. Reymert became editor and the press was moved to his home in Denoon, where it became his political soapbox.
Muskego, a Native American word for cranberry bogs, is an apt description of the surrounding lowland which the original Norwegians settled on. Standing on a large glacial kame which rises as a hilly knob south of Wind Lake, you can see for miles around. This scenic and serene spot was the perfect choice to locate a church. As the church was the center of 19th century community life, the “Old Muskego” state historical marker greets visitors at the base of “Indian Hill.” Walk up the hill and pass under the Norway cemetery arch. A Norwegian flag flies nearby, making you feel a little like you have passed over into Valhalla.The most labor-intensive task for farmers at that time was transporting harvested crops to market by ox team and wagon. For two or three years after immigrating, pioneers were subsistence farming, raising crops for their own families. At the beginning, they were clearing land and breaking a couple acres each year. Later, they could sell their surplus at market.Muskego-Norway was closer to a shipping port than any other Norwegian-American settlement of the 1840s. The relatively short twenty-five-mile distance to the port of Milwaukee could be covered in one or two days. This made it easier for Muskego farmers to sell their harvest, then for those farther away. It was also easier for immigrants to travel to Muskego-Norway. Friends and relatives took in newcomers, who crowded into 16x18 foot log cabins. Many slept in the loft, others slept in makeshift lean-tos or barns, and others bedded down in hay mounds. As they arrived, some unwittingly brought highly infectious cholera, which ended up decimating the colony. Before the cholera epidemics began, Tollef Bache hired Claus Lauritz Clausen to educate the community’s children. A Dane, Clausen traveled throughout Scandinavia, studying for the first ten years of his adult life. Søren Bache returned home in 1843 to provide reports to his father about the colony and refill the cashbox with more silver. Clausen, his bride Martha and Søren Bache returned to America the following year with another group of colonists. They traveled in first class cabins and enjoyed meal service, while the other colonists were crammed below deck. Not long after arriving, the ambitious Clausen determined that Muskego-Norway needed a preacher more than they needed a teacher and he worked to create that job for himself. As is often the case, religion drove a wedge through the community. Clausen rallied newcomers to sign a petition calling him to be their Lutheran minister, even though he had little formal theological training. Bache and Heg had established the community specifically so their countrymen could worship as Haugeans. They resented Clausen’s efforts to dictate the religious tone of the community. This rift, along with the terrible reality of diseases that ravaged the settlement, eventually caused Clausen to move on to the Rock Prairie (Luther Valley) Norwegian settlement in Rock County.
Norway Lutheran Church, also known as Old Muskego Church, was the first Norwegian church built in the United States. It was constructed in 1845 in Muskego, Wisconsin, to serve the growing Norwegian population there. It was used for its original purpose for 24 years before being replaced by a bigger church in 1870. The church was built on a hill called "Indian Hill", which had previously been a sacred site for the Potawatomi. After the new church was built, the original church was moved to a farm to be used as a barn. In 1904, Luther Theological Seminary bought it and had it transported to the current site on its campus. The church was reconstructed in its current location and restored by Charles L. Jacobson. The church's records are housed in the Seminary's archives and are available for research. The church was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.
Norwegian-Wisconsinites Nels Bergan, John N. Johnson, John Rood and others started the Heg Park Commission, which raised money in the community to create what became the first public park in Racine County. Bergan was also the dynamo behind the creation of Racine’s Memorial Hall and co-founder of the Racine County Historical Society.Nils Bergan, who came to Racine County from Norway in 1906, spearheaded the construction of Racine’s Memorial Hall. Bergan led the effort to create Heg Memorial Park, although in a 1957 interview he credited Ella Stratton Corbo as the guiding force behind the park’s establishment. According to his obituary, he paid the downpayment for the eleven acres of land out of his own pocket to the Jacobson family, which sold the land to the Heg Park Commission for just a third of its value.
Wisconsin Norwegians agreed that Hans Heg, who led his battalion before dying on a Civil War battlefield in Georgia typified the Norwegian-American hero. But where to erect the statue they wanted to commission to commemorate this man? The Racine faction wanted to create a Norwegian-American park here and make the Heg statue its centerpiece. Other Norwegians in Wisconsin wanted the Heg statue placed prominently on Madison’s capitol square. Funds were raised for a trio of Heg statues: one for his birthplace in Lier, Norway, one for Capitol Square and one on land in Muskego-Norway which became Racine County’s first county park.
Lutheran churches have been holding lutefisk dinner fundraisers for a century. Cultural events surrounding food are natural ways to celebrate one’s ethnicity and culture. For Norwegians, that entails eating reconstituted dried codfish and cold climate root vegetables, all smothered with butter or cream sauce. The Norway Lutheran Church has their lutefisk dinner on the second Saturday in February. People eat in shifts with 150 seated at a time. Many participants wear Nordic sweaters or traditional bunads, decorated with silver brooches, passed down from their grandmothers.Watch the church's website calendar to enroll in their winter classes to learn how to prepare the traditional Norwegian foods they will be cooking for the lutefisk dinner.
Nord Kapp (North Cape) is at Norway’s northern tip above the Arctic Circle. The village of North Cape is in Racine County’s Yorkville township. Mons Aadland, a survivor of the Norwegian’s Beaver Creek settlement in Illinois was the third Norwegian settler of “Yorkville Prairie.” In the twenty years before the Civil War, Mons and other Norwegians built a community. They shared a minister with Muskego-Norway and built a church in 1850. The North Cape and Norway Lutheran churches are only nine miles apart, so Norwegians from the two communities interacted with each other.Svein Nilsson, the first to write about Norwegian-Wisconsin history, liked Yorkville. Between 1868-1870, Nilsson printed a history column in his monthly magazine, Billed-Magazin. Nilsson wrote that his Yorkville countrymen were more knowledgeable, were better readers and had some of the most productive farms. He thought of them as more forward thinking then their other countrymen in America.At the time Nilsson wrote these articles, Wisconsin agriculture was changing. Intense farming had depleted the wheat fields of southern Wisconsin of its nutrients. Wheat, the main cash crop, was failing. Converting to dairy farming was the solution for many Wisconsin farmers, but it was a difficult transition. Establishing a dairy farm is cash intensive. Barns had to be built for the cows and fodder had to be grown, harvested and properly stored. As the operation grew, additional farmhands had to be hired. Milk had to be processed into butter and cheese. Nilsson described the process being used by Mons Aadland and his son Thomas to change their still profitable farm from wheat to dairy. Aadland’s statement about the emergence of Wisconsin dairying may be the earliest information ever published, on Norwegians in Wisconsin embracing dairying.Dairying is so important in Wisconsin today that the state nickname is “America’s Dairyland.” In 2024, dairying accounted for over 150,000 jobs and almost half of agricultural income in Wisconsin. Mons Aadland and other Norwegian-Americans were part of the history of the Wisconsin dairy industry.
This Tour is a Walking Tour.
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This is a series of driving tours to discover the first Norwegian settlements in Wisconsin. Click the 'DRIVING' button at the top right of the screen, just below the map, for the correct point-to-point driving map.
