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When Even Heg built his large barn, church services moved from Johannesen and Bache’s trading post to the barn to accommodate the crowds. Both Eielsen and Clausen performed services in Heg’s barn.In October 1843, Clausen was ordained by a German-Lutheran pastor from Milwaukee and a month later Clausen and the Muskego congregation decided to build a church on the top of the tallest hill near Wind Lake. Construction began the following year. Prior to that<blockquote>Clausen was using Even Heg's big barn to hold worship services . . . In this barn, the first Norwegian couples to be married by a Norwegian pastor in America (were) John Evenson Molee to Anne Jacobsdatter Einong, and Hans Tveito to Aslaug Jacobsdatter Einong, all Tinndoler. The double wedding was a memorable occasion for everyone.[1]</blockquote>

Hans Heg property (in red) and barn (in blue) on Town of Norway (WI) plat map, 1858

Order book: History of the Norwegian settlements

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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.

Even Heg barn

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.

Stories told by Ansten Natesta during his visit back to Norway in 1840 excited many in south-central Norway. A group of forty excited and hopeful people from Tinn and Hjetdal in upper Telemarken wanted to emigrate with Natesta when he returned to America. But because there wasn’t room aboard the ship, they had to travel to Skien to board another schooner. Half of that group were members of John Nelson Luraas’ extended family.Luraas explained why he came to America:<blockquote>I was my father’s oldest son, and consequently heir to the Luraas farm. It was one of the best in that neighborhood, but there was a (large) mortgage on it. I had no opportunity of getting money. It was plain to me that I would have a hard time of it, if I should take the farm with the debt . . . pay a reasonable amount to my brothers and sisters and assume the care of my aged father. I saw to my horror how one farm after the other fell into the hands of the lendsmand and other money lenders.[1]</blockquote>There were almost always unplanned delays and extra expenses on the emigrant journey. When Luraas’ group reached Buffalo, New York, they made a risky choice. To save money, they contracted with a schooner captain to transport them at a cut-rate price to Milwaukee. They booked passage on a barely seaworthy sailing ship loaded with explosives. Twice their ship almost sank. In a tempestuous storm, one woman was washed overboard, never to be seen again.At Milwaukee, the ship had to anchor offshore because the not-yet-dredged Milwaukee harbor wasn’t yet deep enough for ships to safely enter the river and dock. Passengers and luggage had to be unloaded into rowboats and rowed to shore. Once safely on land in Milwaukee, the local residents gave them a skit to convince the newcomers to settle in the area. Luraas recalled this greeting:<blockquote>The day after we arrived, some Milwaukee people came on board the vessel. They asked what we intended to do in America. We told them we were farmers and desired to buy land and were thinking of going to Illinois.</blockquote><blockquote>We were told, ‘go where you like, this is a free country. But if you want to do what is best for yourselves, then take my advice.’ He then presented two persons, one who was a large fat man, the picture of health, while the other was a mere skeleton, all emaciated from disease. He said ‘this fat man is from Wisconsin, where there is a healthy climate and an abundance of food; this invalid is from Illinois where people are burnt up by a scorching heat and where they die from malarial fever. Now choose as you think best’</blockquote><blockquote>It was a hot August day. (We) were perspiring in (our) thick woolen clothes (and) thought with dread of the heat in Illinois, where we would soon be changed into skeletons. We went ashore in Milwaukee, a city which was then in its infancy . . . The fat man exhibited to us was the well-known (George H.) Walker after whom the present south side of the city was called Walker’s Point.[2]</blockquote>Luraas’ group made the “Beaver Creek mistake” of settling on wetlands. The summer drought changed the marshes of springtime into seemingly verdant grasslands. In the spring, the group’s log cabins were underwater. Almost two centuries later, some of those lands first bought by the Norwegians still have not been drained or coaxed into farmland. Some of those who claimed land on higher ground stayed; most left. Failing farmers eventually migrated to a new edge of the frontier. John Nelson Luraas and other initial Muskego settlers abandoned their poor farmland and tried their luck in the more bountiful Koshkonong settlement. Luraas was the first Norwegian settler in Dunkirk Township, of which is home to the very Norwegian American village of Stoughton.

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.

Muskego Dam Road

Johannsen, Bache and the Haugean lay minister Elling Eielsen, emigrated as a trio. Tollef Bache paid for the trip of his advance scouts. They sailed from Drammen to Providence, Rhode Island, arriving in early September 1839. Johannsen safeguarded a strongbox holding Tollef’s money to be used for a new Haugean colony in America.They visited Ole and Ansted Natesta at Jefferson Prairie, then headed back to the Fox River settlement for the winter.The next spring, based on the Natestas’ advice, they went back to Wisconsin exploring for land to start a Haugean colony. Arriving at Muskego, Johannes decided not to settle with the Norwegians in the swampy bottoms bordering Big Muskego Lake. Instead, they bought land two miles south, including land purchased from an Irish squatter who had built a ramshackle hut on the scenic isthmus between Wind Lake and Waubeesee Lake.To improve their living quarters, Johanssen and Bache, with Heg’s help, dug out a large Indian mound which stood as a grave site and memorial to the ancestors of pre-Columbian Native Americans. Johannsen and Heg may not have realized the spiritual significance of the mound until it was almost completely excavated.Søren Bache wrote in his diary about their in-the-hill home:We got a room twenty-four feet long, eighteen feet wide and seven feet high. The first story was entirely underground. Over it we built a loft five logs high which rested on six pillars about seven feet (tall). The walls of our dugout was so firm that there was no danger of a cave-in and we merely needed to provide it with wainscot in order to get a good warm dwelling.<blockquote>The mound proved to be an Indian grave. At the bottom we found twelve or fourteen skulls and some other bones . . . They must have had a culture similar to that of pagan times in our own country, as is witnessed by the big (Viking) mounds in Norway, which can, in some ways be compared to this one.[1]</blockquote>Their dugout trading post became the center of community life. As a pioneer convenience store and post office, one could get tobacco, coffee, flour, sugar or gunpowder on credit. Butter, eggs, chickens and pork were used as barter. It was a place where you could pull up a split log bench, sip whiskey, spit tobacco juice and swap stories about everyday pioneer life. Johannes was always ready to offer sage advice.

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.

Bache & Johannsen trading post

An early Norwegian settler of Muskego-Norway was James Denoon Reymert. His Scottish mother and ship captain father lived near the southern tip of Norway. As a teenager, Reymert had business school training in Christiania and studied law in Scotland. Reymert emigrated to Muskego in 1842 at age twenty-one. Being able to speak English and understand law gave him many advantages. Reymert partnered with Even Heg and Soren Bache to start the first Norwegian newspaper in Wisconsin. At the time, newspaper publishers printed strongly worded content to promote their political philosophy. Nordlyset had almost two hundred fifty subscribers throughout Illinois and Wisconsin during its short existence (1847-1850). A few readers as far away as New York City received the four-page 8x10 inch weekly paper through the mail. The subscriber list reads like a Who’s Who of initial Norwegian pioneer settlement.Reymert represented western Racine County at the Territorial conventions which formed the state’s constitution. He was a member of the state assembly during the political turmoil of the 1850s. He got a state contract to publish maps of Wisconsin in Norwegian and a license to build the Waterford-Wind Lake section of the Milwaukee-Janesville plank road. He hired scores of his fellow Norwegians to chop down trees, operate a sawmill to cut the timber into thick rough-hewn planks, grade a roadway, set the planks and cover them with gravel and dirt to make a solid travel base. He dreamed of creating a Norwegian-American city at Denoon. Reymert’s inn, near the plank road at the northern end of Wind Lake, burned to the ground in the mid-1850s. The world-renowned Norwegian musician Ole Bull visited him right after the fire, giving an impromptu concert to raise money for Reymert next to the smoldering ashes of his burnt-out home.When the Republican party formed in 1854, Reymert stayed with the Democrats, instead of becoming a pro-abolitionist Republican, like most Norwegians did. The loss of the Norwegian community’s support cost him election to Congress in 1856. No longer an office holder, Reymert was appointed superintendent of the Hudson, Wisconsin land office. He resigned after some financial irregularities were discovered. At the start of the Civil War, Reymert started a New York City law practice, then became involved in ranching in South America and silver mining in Arizona. Reymert was appointed Arizona territorial judge. Reymert retired to a ranch just south of Pasadena, California.

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.

Denoon

Clausen was one of many who fled to escape Muskego’s grim reaper, but not before he officiated at the burials of hundreds of Norwegian-Wisconsinites who were struck down by malaria. In one month at the peak of the epidemic, over a hundred men, women and children died. They were buried in a mass grave in the Norway Lutheran Church cemetery, with Clausen offering prayers. A grey granite stone with an affixed plaque symbolizes the burial site.John Nelson Luraas said:<blockquote>“The settlement grew and became a stopping place for many later immigrants who would remain in Muskego a year or two before going out to other settlements in Wisconsin. But in 1849, 1850 and 1852, cholera visited the settlement and caused such a mortality that the location came into disrepute. Most of those who were spared emigrated to other settlements.”[1]</blockquote>John Evenson Molee wrote:<blockquote>“1849 was the year of the Asiatic cholera in the United States and Europe. It was the awfulest summer I experienced in my life. When the epidemic struck our settlement, there were, at one time, only seven families all well, so that they could get away to help their neighbors. Three or four persons died every day. Hans Tveito and myself had all we could do, to carry the dead out of the houses and haul them to the grave with our oxen, while others dug the graves. No ceremony took place. We simply rolled a white sheet around the dead, unwashed and unshaven. Then we placed him or her into a rough board box, unplaned and unpainted, and hauled them to a spot selected for a graveyard, called ‘the Indian hill’ where we laid them to rest. It was the best we could do, God knows. We cared for them the best we could, while living, but when dead, they did not need more care.”[2]</blockquote>One of the heroes of the cholera epidemic was a Norwegian convict named Hansen. In the late 1830’s he was one of Norway’s most notorious burglars. He reformed while imprisoned and was paroled under the condition that he leave Norway. According to Rev. H.G. Stub, Hansen found his way to Muskego-Norway:<blockquote>“He had but one mission in life – to do good. For a while, he carried the mail between Muskego and Milwaukee . . . mainly on foot both ways. He had a small shop where he made and sold tinware. But in reality he was Muskego’s nurse. As such he was very much needed. During the last epidemic there were up to fifty patients at one time in the so-called hospital. Like a comforting angel Hansen went from one patient to another with temporal and spiritual help. Finally the powerful Hansen also succumbed, but not to cholera . . . He was taken sick with typhoid . . . After a long and hard sickness he died . . . The Hansen funeral was the largest funeral held in Muskego up to that time.”[3]</blockquote>Colonel Heg, his parents and many of the settlers from the old country are buried in the church’s cemetery. Even and Sigrid Heg are buried at the back of the cemetery on the far side of the church. The white pillar in the distance is Colonel Hans Heg’s gravesite.

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 cemetery

As part of training Lutheran ministers, Gjermund Høyme, the head of the United Lutheran Church, envisioned having Lutheran theology students preach from a pioneer pulpit. That way they could experience a little of what a circuit pastor in the early days of the Norwegian American church did. Høyme was dedicated to preserving the original preaching experience. Hearing from historians Rasmus Anderson and Hjalmar Rued Holand that the Old Muskego church was deteriorating, he began a fund-raising campaign to preserve the Old Muskego log church.When the new church was built in 1870, the old log church was moved next door to the Jacobson farmstead. A generation later, Hans Jacobson was using it as shelter for his pigs. Jacobson sold it to the United Lutheran Church for $100. With the help of other Jacobson family members, they numbered the ends of the logs and dismantled the pioneer log church. It was shipped by railroad car to St. Paul, Minnesota to the grounds of Luther Seminary. The Jacobsons’ then helped reconstruct the log church.Ministers throughout the Midwest have shared how meaningful it was for them, as Luther Seminary students, to attend services and preach in the Old Muskego Log Church on campus. Some people feel that the log church should never have left Muskego-Norway, but ongoing preservation of the church is costly. It is fortunate that the college maintains this unique historic structure.The Old Muskego log church is on the campus of Luther Seminary, behind Gullixson Hall, 2375 Como Avenue, St. Paul, Minnesota. Borrow a key at the second-floor library desk to see the inside of the church. Terry Martin, author of the book New Masters of Woodworking wrote that:<blockquote>“. . .(I) stumbled upon one of the true woodturning treasures in the United States when I visited here. It was clearly an attempt to elevate their place of worship above the commonplace.”[1]</blockquote>The altar and pulpit are made of walnut. The altar cloth was designed by Norwegian church vestment expert Helen Engelstad using the needlework style of the time.Paul Daniels, Luther Seminary archivist, explained that the Old Muskego Log Church was meant to be a temporary structure. When the church was moved to Luther Seminary, it was placed on a hill, overlooking its surroundings, similar to the way the building originally overlooked the Muskego-Norway countryside.In the twenty-five years that it served as a place of worship, the old Muskego log church saw thousands of immigrants bow their heads to pray. For many, it was the first church they had been in since arriving from the old country. They knelt and gave thanks that they had survived their journey. They prayed for help to find fruitful land and build a good life in America. Hundreds grieved in the same log church during the cholera epidemics and other illness and accidents which took their loved ones from them. Much joy, pain and sense of community has been experienced in the walls of this church.In the First Chapter of Norwegian Immigration Rasmus Anderson wrote about a letter he received from H.J. Ellertsen, describing the church building:<blockquote>“It was built of oak logs hewed on both sides, six inches thick, and matched after the Norwegian fashion of building houses. On the inside the logs were dressed perfectly smooth and then fitted so close together that no mortar was used between them. Double doors in the front were made of black walnut. The pulpit was also made of walnut.</blockquote><blockquote> “Galleries were built across the front and along both sides of the church. These galleries were supported by six lathe-turned solid walnut columns. The erection of the church (started) in spring 1844 and the dedication took place March 13, 1845. It is undoubtedly the first Norwegian church built in America.”[2]</blockquote>As the Muskego congregation became wealthier, they built a new brick church on Indian Hill. At the same time, they were building frame and clapboard homes to replace their modest log cabins. It was a sure sign of progress.In 1870, the old log church was auctioned off, dismantled and rebuilt on a local farm. Rasmus Anderson and Gjermund Hoyme discussed rescuing the church, which was being used as a farm outbuilding and bringing it to Luther Seminary. There it could be used as a chapel, so theology students could experience how pioneering Norwegian immigrants worshiped. Hjalmar Rued Holand was disturbed to see the old Muskego log church used as a grisehus (pig sty) and urged that it be saved.The United Lutheran Church synod negotiated buying the building from Hans Jacobson for $100. They quickly signed the contract after Jacobson said that the Norwegian Synod gave him an offer for double the price. The United Lutheran Church was able to acquire the building, because of the relationship their local minister, Gerhard Rasmussen, had with the Jacobson family who owned it. At the time, locals wanted to keep the church at Muskego. In retrospect, it was fortunate that the church went to Luther Seminary, because it has taken significant resources to maintain the building over the years. The cost to move the building to St. Paul and rebuild it was $2,000 ($65,000 in 2024 money). Sons of Peder Jacobson, one of the original church builders, numbered all the logs so the log church could be properly reassembled.In the National Registry of Historical Places application, Minnesota historic sites survey specialist John Hackett wrote:<blockquote>“In 1904, Muskego church was purchased, dismantled and removed to be reconstructed at the building’s present site. The exterior walls were adzed, and hand planed . . . The massive logs are coped and scribed with interlocking ends shaped by an axe. The fit of the hewn logs is so tight that only the interlocking ends of the logs have been chinked with clay . . . The church had segregated seating, with men on the right and women on the left. The balcony was also segregated. The pews are not original but of this uncomfortable type.” [3]</blockquote>Woodworking expert Terry Martin wrote:<blockquote>“The size of the columns is impressive – at least seven feet tall and quite thick. They must have been hard to mount on a lathe. When I looked more closely . . . the tool marks were still quite evident and there was a lot of deep tearout on the detail work. (I have) the deepest respect for the craftsmen who worked so hard to produce this work . . .</blockquote><blockquote>“Halvor Lohner, a house builder from Telemark, took a leading part (in building the church) and Peder Jacobson . . . was the one who by use of a lathe turned the pillars inside the church. Ole Spellum is said to have turned the balusters of the small pillars of the altar ring . . . Jacobson probably had to forge his own tools . . . The lathe used to turn these columns must have been very large. How was it driven? Large logs like this are very heavy . . . It must have taken a lot of power to start them turning and to maintain any kind of speed.</blockquote><blockquote> “When I sat quietly in this old building and thought about those turners, I was quite moved . . . I have to ask myself if I could produce such work under those conditions and I am sure I could not . . . If I was impressed when I walked through the door, I can imagine how it must have seemed to the farmers of the region when they first saw it.” [4]</blockquote>Women of the congregation helped build the church alongside the men. Hjalmar Rued Holand wrote that when he visited the Old Muskego Church in 1897, he learned that Kari Hogenson carried wooden shingles up the ladder to her husband Ole, who shingled the church's roof [5] Other women would have labored alongside their husbands, or in splitting wooden slabs to make shingles, or in their kitchens supplying nutrition to the building bee.

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.

Norway Lutheran "Old Muskego" Church

Racine County’s Heg Memorial Park is across the street from the old Norway Lutheran Church. The Norway (Wisconsin) Historical Society operates a museum on the grounds. If you are looking for remnants of Norwegian-American pioneer settlement, this is a good place to visit.One temperature-controlled building holds Old Muskego pioneer artifacts, Norwegian-American cultural displays and photos of Norway’s then-Prince Olav V and Princess Martha’s 1939 visit to honor the 100th anniversary of the Old Muskego settlement. The museum has artifacts from Colonel Hans Heg including his military dress sword. Eliphalet Cramer’s 1837 Yankee log cabin is preserved as an excellent example of early settlement life. It was rebuilt in 1866 in the Norwegian style with a loft above the main living area. It was used as a home until the 1920s. The log cabin illustrates the way early settlers lived and what they used for household goods.An outbuilding holds a large collection of antique farm equipment and tools, a mainstay of a good pioneer history museum, since farm implements were vital tools in the progress of rural Wisconsin settlers. You can get up close to the tools; they are not behind glass.The parsonage of Elling Eielson is also on the park grounds. Here the first Haugean minister in America and his family lived. The parsonage was moved to the park from Jefferson Prairie.

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.

Heg park museum

The bronze statue of Colonel Hans Heg is located at the northern end of Heg Park at the triangular intersection of South Loomis and Heg Park Road. This statue honors the leader of the 15th Wisconsin Volunteer regiment. Heg was the highest-ranking Wisconsinite who died in battle during the Civil War. He lost his life in the Battle of Chickamauga, Georgia in 1863. The fearless regiment was ninety-percent Norwegian-born and had one of the Union’s highest casualty rates.For three years leading up to the 1925 Norwegian American centennial celebration, Waldemar Ager, publisher of The Reform, a Norwegian prohibition newspaper in Eau Claire, raised funds throughout Wisconsin for the $20,000 needed for two identical Hans Heg statues. Norwegian-Wisconsinites who worked in Madison, public officials and University of Wisconsin professors of Norwegian ancestry lobbied for the Heg statue to be located on Madison’s capitol square.The statue at Heg’s birthplace in Lier, Norway was installed first, on June 25, 1925, as part of the Norwegian-American centennial celebration. Installation of the second Heg statue was held up by red tape in Madison. There were delays in getting approval from Governor Blaine and the capitol architect to have the statue installed on capitol square. Getting the marble base from the Vermont quarry which supplied the state’s architectural marble delayed the project another year. Three of the last surviving veterans of the 15th Wisconsin Volunteers were among the 1,500 people who witnessed the dedication ceremony on October 17, 1926.Meanwhile, a Racine County committee, headed by Niels Bergan, worked to place an additional Heg statue at the site of the Town of Norway’s first schoolhouse. Sculptor Paul Fjelde provided casting of the third statue at cost. In 1924, Racine hosted Sons of Norway’s District 5 and international conventions. They bussed participants to Wind Lake to propose preserving Heg Park as a Norwegian-American historical site. Several hundred convention participants traveled from Racine to Wind Lake in a cavalcade of autos and busses. They toured the proposed Heg Park site and heard plans for the establishment of a Norwegian-American historical site. This trip was not a small feat considering the condition of roads a hundred years ago.The Sons of Norway voted down the idea of creating Heg Park as a Sons of Norway venue. Bergan’s Heg Park Commission then worked to establish it as Racine County’s first public park. On July 4, 1928, 1,000 from Sons of Norway lodges in southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois attended the Heg statue dedication at Muskego-Norway. Later that fall, due to the renewed public interest in Hans Heg, the Heg family donated some of his personal belongings and military artifacts to the Wisconsin Historical Society. Heg’s military dress sword is on display at the Heg Park museum.In 2022, the Heg statue in Capitol Square lost its head in an act of vandalism. The Heg Park statue was used as a model to create a new head to repair the Capitol Square monument.

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.

Hans Heg statue (Wind Lake WI)

Served family style, everyone enjoys the cultural experience. The meal begins with dinner rolls and lefse, a wafer-thin potato crepe. Peel off a quarter-sheet of lefse, lay it on your plate and smother it with butter, cinnamon sugar or lingonberry jam. Roll it up and savor its light sweet taste. Smiling men and women of the church congregation offer a hearty “Velkommen” and place dishes of steaming food on the table; boiled potatoes with rich cream sauce, thick orange-colored carrot coins, Norwegian meatballs with gravy, boiled onions and rye bread with soft crumbly blue cheese. Perfectly prepared lutefisk is flaky, not gelatinous. Dried by the sun and wind along Norway’s North Sea coast, dried cod is shipped around the world in barrels. To prepare it, it is reconstituted with lye acid, then the cod is then repeatedly soaked in water, then boiled. Even for non-lutefisk fans, enough melted butter can make almost anything taste good.In the weeks before the dinner, bakers are also busy making hundreds of traditional Norwegian cookies: waffle-cone krumkake, sandbakkel shortbread cookies in a variety of shapes, shatteringly light rosettes, gingery pepparkaka and colorful fruit-studded Julekaka Christmas bread. A small cup of fruit soup of stewed prunes, grape juice, walnuts, raisins and apples is also served. Delicious!Sitting with friends enjoying the lutefisk dinner is a welcome way to talk to other diners about both current and departed friends and relatives, memories of friendship and good times. What a great way to savor one’s heritage.

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.

1954 Norway Lutheran Church – lutefisk dinner

Mons Aadland had had enough of marshy land. He and his family joined Ole Rynning, then met up with Ole Natesta on the Great Lakes on their way to the Midwest. The group landed in Chicago and headed south. They claimed land along Beaver Creek in Iroquois County, Illinois, seventy miles from Chicago. Sadly, one third of the colonists died of malaria the first year. Their leader, university-educated Ole Rynning, died the second year. Understandably, most of the survivors left Beaver Creek. They headed back to Chicago or made their way to the Fox River Illinois Norwegian settlement northeast of Ottawa, Illinois. Mons Aadland was one of the more stubborn settlers who kept trying to make the poorly drained soil productive. Aadland came to America with 1000 speciedollar (about $1000) sewn into his clothes. When he left Beaver Creek, he had only three dollars, and a few head of cattle. He heard that recently surveyed land in Wisconsin was coming on the market. Mons hitched up his oxen and loaded up his family and their few belongings. He led his oxen 150 miles to drier prairie on the edge of the frontier. He sold most of his cattle to buy his new farmland.Svein Nilsson interviewed Mons Aadland in 1868, the year before he died. Aadland’s persistence and hard work over the years had paid off. Actively farming at age 75, Nilsson described Aadland as the wealthiest farmer in the area, with eight hundred acres of land and property worth $40,000. Aadland would be a multi-millionaire today.Nilsson describes a visit to Aadland:<blockquote>Before leaving the Yorkville congregation I will ask the reader to visit with me one of the homes in the settlement. We will call on one of the prosperous farmers . . . The house . . . has a very fine appearance and in general resembles the homes of well-to-do farmers in the neighborhood of Christiania . . . Spinning wheel and loom speak of home industries, and that they are not showpieces is proven by masses of yarn and bundles of home-woven cloth whose lively colors and beautiful patterns betray an artistic sense not present in every Norwegian valley.</blockquote><blockquote>Our friendly host shows us around the farm; we follow him to the barn where we find twenty cows all apparently contented as they stand there along the limestone walls. We let the farmer speak:</blockquote><blockquote>‘I find that cows pay well for their upkeep, but you must take good care of them if cattle-raising is to succeed. I grind grain with the aid of a windmill and mix the grain with finely-cut hay to make the mash used as fodder. When I get an apparatus for warming water close to the barn door, the work will be easier. It is best for the farmer to tend the cattle himself. We Norwegians help the women too little with work like this which, following our old country ideas, falls to their lot.</blockquote><blockquote>It takes some time before a farmer can raise a superior herd of cattle which pay for the trouble and expense of keeping them. But once this is done, the cow-barn can become his greatest source of income. I have just barely gotten a start; but still, from a week’s milk supply I sell fifty dollars worth of butter. The Norwegians’ care of cattle is not to be sneered at. Even the Yankees are beginning to realize this.”[1]</blockquote>In Nilsson’s Yorkville articles, he told several interesting stories. One is that, in 1868 North Cape had a singing society, which would have been one of the first Norwegian singing societies in America. He also wrote about two interesting blind brothers, who came as children with their parents to North Cape. Nilsson wrote:<blockquote>Elling Spillum’s two youngest sons live on a well-kept farm which not only gives them a good income but leaves them a considerable annual surplus. Both of them have now been completely blind for many years, and a feeling of sadness instinctively gripped me when, during my stay in Yorkville, I had the opportunity to visit these two brothers whom fate apparently had given so heavy a cross. But if it is true that only those are unfortunate who think they are, then undoubtedly many who have the great gift of sight might envy these two men their peace of mind and their trust in the will of Providence . . . </blockquote><blockquote>In these men creative imagination, keen thinking, good memory and an unbelievably fine sense of touch have combined to take the place of sight. The two blind brothers have built the house in which they live, and no one can deny that everything, even down to the most delicate carpentry work, has been well done. The older brother, Hendrek, now a man of fifty years, is a master of all sorts of woodwork. Not only is he a wheelwright and cooper but also a cabinetmaker. Even experts declare that if anything distinguishes his work from that of seeing artisans it is the greater care with which his products are made. He has invented most of the implements he works with and often employs methods which bear testimony to exceptional keenness. Various works of his reveal the real artist.[2]</blockquote>

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.

Norsk Cheesehead tour #03 - Muskego-Norway and Yorkville

Even Heg barn

Introduction

Images

Backstory and Context

Sources

Additional Information