Hunting Swedish History

10 4 09

Now went huntingfor Swedish history per my new book Touring Swedish America. We drove north from Minneapolis about 50 miles. The first town was called Chisago and is famous because the Swedish author Vilhelm Moberg came here 1948 and explored the area by bicycle. He did research on Swedish immigration for his famous four books - The Emigrants, Unto a Good Land, The Settlers, and The Last Letter Home. There is a statue of him with his bike in their park that was dedicated in 1996 by the king and queen of Sweden. There was a Swedish flag on a pole next to him.

We walked around and stopped at the bakery and talked to the baker while we ate a pastry there. He said that the Swedes were dying out. They meet every week and talk Swedish but there are not many left. He also told us of a customer who stopped shopping at his bakery, when he bought a Japanese car!

Not far from there was the town of Lindstrom, a little bigger. The water tower is painted like a coffee pot just like in Kingsburg, CA. At the town square there was a statue of Karl Oskar and Kristina Nilsson - the main characters in Moberg's books. There was even a large boulder there brought all the way from Duvemala, where the story starts! In the county park Kichi-Saga there was a building which RESEMBLES the home described in the novels! A little too much, isn't? Next to the statue was an expensive monument honoring veterans.

Nearby was Glader Cemetery - 1855-1919 - the areas first burial ground for settlers.

We stopped at Center City to see "the largest and finest rural church in Minnesota" but it was locked.

It was now lunch time and we returned to Lindstrom and the Swedish Inn where we had the worst meal so far - the scrawniest salad bar, torsk (cod) with a brown sauce, Jalil's roast beef was "horrible" but his soup was OK but difficult to describe.

The next town was Taylors Falls located on the scenic St. Croix River. The Swedish settlers disembarked here from the riverboat in the 1850's. I think that I remember that from reading Moberg a long, long time ago. This looked like a busy tourist town but was slow now. We ran into a woman walking her dog. She told us to go down to the river and see the cross. You could take a narrated tour in a paddlewheel boat down the river but we decided we needed to walk. We did not see any cross and turned around. We then ran into the same woman and she walked us back down to see the cross. She told me that her great grandfather was Swedish and she used to come here in her childhood. She was very grateful for the sacrifices he made that she was now benefiting from. Now her husband had been transferred here to work in the jail and she was happy to live here again. By now we had reach the river and she pointed out the rock across the river that looked like a cross. I guess French people were there first.

Now this river is on the border between Minnesota and Wisconsin and Jalil can't miss a chance to enter another state so we had to walk across the bridge but that was not enough so we had to drive to the town of St. Croix. We did not stop there, just drove through but we did notice a group of women in red hats and purple clothes. I ran into some of these women with Ulla in Nevada City. Its is a club for women and the only requirements are that they wear a red hat, purple clothes and that they have fun. Do not remember the name of the group.

By this time we were getting tired and not so curious about Swedish things any more so we bypassed Skandia and Gammelgarden and drove back to Minneapolis/St.Paul. This is when I tried to see Milles' statue but could not find it. We then continued to Bloomington where the nation's largest retail and entertainment center is. We heard that people come from Japan to see this shopping center! There are 20,000 free parking places!!!! Luckily, they closed 20 minutes after we arrived. That was enough for us.