_The Founding of the Fox River Settlement.
Personal Notes on Some of the Founders._
In the spring of 1834 Jacob Anderson Slogvig, Knud Anderson Slogvig,
Gudmund Haugaas, Thorsten Olson Bjaaland, Nels Thompson,[31] Andrew
(Endre) Dahl, and Kleng Peerson left for La Salle County; they became,
therefore, as far as we know, the first Norwegian settlers in Illinois,
and indeed in the Northwest, barring Ingebret Narvig, who had located
in Michigan the year before. These men selected their land and
perfected their purchase as soon as it came into market the following
spring. The first two to buy land were Jacob Slogvig and Gudmund
Haugaas, whose purchase is recorded under June fifteenth, 1835, the
former of eighty acres, the latter one hundred and sixty acres, both
in that part of what was then called Mission Township, but later came
to be Rutland. On June seventeenth, Kleng Peerson's purchase of eighty
acres is recorded, as also that of his sister, Carrie Nelson, widow of
Cornelius Nelson Hersdal, namely, eighty acres of land bought for her
by Peerson. For this date are also recorded the purchases of Thorsten
Olson Bjaaland, eighty acres, Nels Thompson, one hundred and sixty
acres, in what later became Miller Township.
[31] Nels Thompson had married Bertha Caroline, the widow of
Olen Thompson in 1827. She had three daughters by her first
husband: Sara, born 1818; Anna, born 1819; and Caroline, born
1825 (died in Rochester, N. Y., 1826). Nels Thompson and wife
had two children: Serena, born 1828; Abraham, born 1830; and
Caroline, born in 1833.
In 1835 Daniel Rossadal and family, Nels Nelson Hersdal, George
Johnson, and Carrie Nelson Hersdal with family of seven children moved
to La Salle County. Nels Hersdal secured six hundred and forty acres in
exchange for one hundred acres he owned in Orleans County, New York.
The slooper Thomas Madland, as we have seen, died in 1826; his widow
and family of seven also moved to Illinois in 1831. Gjert Hovland came
in 1835, and on June seventeenth purchased one hundred and sixty acres
of land in Miller Township. Nels Hersdal purchased on September fifth
Thorsten Bjaaland's eighty acres in the same township; the latter,
however, bought a hundred and sixty acres again on January sixteenth,
1836, in the same locality. The record of these purchases was copied by
R. B. Anderson and printed in his book, _First Chapter_, etc., cited
above and also in Strand's _History of the Norwegians of Illinois_,
page 75.
Knud Slogvig, who, as we see, came in 1834, did not buy land but
somewhat later returned east and in 1835 went back to Norway. There
he married a sister of the slooper, Ole Olson Hetletvedt and, as
we shall have occasion to note under causes of emigration, became
largely instrumental in bringing about the emigration of 1836.
Baldwin's _History of La Salle County_ also states, page 74, that
Oliver Canuteson,[32] Oliver Knutson,[32] Christian Olson, and Ole
Olson Hetletvedt came to the county in 1834, but the date seems to be
uncertain. With regard to Christian Olson the fact seems rather to be
that he came in 1836 or possibly not till 1837, while also Hetletvedt
seems to be dated about two years too early here. Among those who
came in 1836 according to apparently reliable records are: Ole Olson
Hetletvedt and Gudmund Sandsberg.
[32] Or are these two the same person?
Relative to the founders of the Fox River Settlement, as that of La
Salle County came to be called, I wish to add here the following
facts of personal history: Gudmund Haugaas, one of the two first to
record the purchase of land, had married Julia, the daughter of Thomas
Madland, in Orleans County in 1827. She died in Rutland Township, La
Salle County, in 1846 and he later married Caroline Hervig, a sister
of Henrik Hervig (Harwick). He had ten children by his first wife.
In Illinois he joined the Mormon Church and became an elder in that
church, practicing medicine at the same time, and, it is said, with
much success. He died of the cholera on the homestead near Norway in
July, 1849; his widow, Caroline, survived him three years.[33]
[33] Mrs. R. W. Bower of Sheridan, Illinois, is a daughter of
Haugaas and his wife Caroline. Other children of his are
Daniel Haugaas in Henderson, Iowa, and Mrs. Isabel Lewis,
Emington, Illinois, and Thomas Haugaas.
Jacob Slogvig married Serena, daughter of Thomas Madland, in March,
1831. He became one of the founders of the Norwegian settlement in Lee
County, Iowa, in 1840 (see below), later went to California, where
he died in May, 1864. The widow lived until about 1897. Some time
before her death she had been living at the home of her son, Andrew J.
Anderson, at San Diego, California.
Mrs. Carrie Nelson had seven children, of whom Anne, Nels, Inger, and
Martha were born in Norway; Sarah, Peter, and Amelia were born at
Kendall, New York. Carrie Nelson died in 1848. The son, Nels Nelson,
born 1816, married Catherine Iverson about 1840; he died in Sheridan,
Illinois, in August, 1893, as the last male member of the sloop party,
being survived by his widow and four of twelve children. The daughter
Inger was in 1836 married to John S. Mitchell, of Ottawa, Illinois;
Martha married Beach Fallows, a settler of 1835, and Sarah married in
1849 Canute Marsett, an immigrant of 1837, who some years later became
a Mormon bishop at Ephraim, Utah. Their oldest son, Peter Cornelius
Marsett, born at Salt Lake City June second, 1850, was the first child
born of Norwegian parents in Utah.[34] Peter C. Nelson, the youngest
son of Carrie Nelson, born 1830, later settled in Larned, Kansas, where
he died in 1904. Sara Thompson, oldest daughter of Öien Thompson,
and born 1818, married George Olmstead in 1857 in La Salle County;
he died in 1849, and in 1855 she married William W. Richey. Mrs.
Richey settled in Guthrie Center, Iowa, in 1882, where she lived until
recently. Benson C. Olmsted, Charles B. Olmsted and Will F. Richey of
Guthrie Center, Iowa, are sons of Mrs. Sara Richey. Nels Thompson died
in La Salle County, Illinois, in July, 1863. Daniel Rossadal and his
wife, Bertha, both died in La Salle County in 1854. Nels Nelson Hersdal
was born in July, 1800, and his wife, Bertha, in May, 1804; they were
married a few months before the departure of the sloop. He, "Big Nels",
as he was called, came to Illinois in 1835, returned to New York and
did not bring his family to Illinois until 1846, though he moved west
before. He lived until 1886, his wife having died in 1882. Peter Nelson
and Ira Nelson of La Salle County, are their sons. George Johnson died
from cholera in 1849.
[34] For these facts I am indebted to R. B. Anderson, as also
for other details of the personal history of the slooper's
descendants.
Andrew Dahl went to Utah in the fifties, being one of the earliest
pioneers of that state. A son of his, A. S. Anderson, was a member
of the Utah Constitutional Convention in 1895. Ole Hetletvedt, who
located at Niagara Falls, not therefore in Orleans County, had three
sons, Porter C., Sören L. and James W. The first of these, born 1831,
became captain and later colonel in Company F, 36th Regiment, Illinois
Volunteers, in the War of the Rebellion, and was Acting Brigadier
General when he was killed in the Battle of Franklin (Tenn.). Sören
Olson was killed in the Battle of Murfreesboro. James Olson, who also
went to the front, lived to return to his home after the war. Porter
Olson lies buried at Newark, Illinois, where a fitting monument adorns
his grave. Finally I wish to add that Margaret Allen, the "sloop girl"
born on the Atlantic, daughter of Lars Larson, married John Atwater in
Rochester, New York, in 1857. They afterwards moved to Chicago, where
he died in the early nineties, while Mrs. Atwater is, I believe, still
living at Western Springs, Cook County. We shall now return to our
settlement in La Salle County.
We have given above a brief account of the founding of the Fox River
settlement. Out of that nucleus of about thirty persons, whom we
know to have come there in 1834-35 grew up one of the largest and
most prosperous of rural communities in the country. The settlement
developed rapidly, before many years extending into Kendall, Grundy and
DeKalb counties and becoming a distributing point in the westward march
of Norwegian immigration during the following years. The settlement
in Orleans County, New York, ceased to grow, the objective point of
immigrants from Norway had been changed and the Fox River region
received large accessions, especially during the year 1836.
Immigration from Norway which heretofore had been more or less
sporadic, in which individuals and very small groups are found to take
part, now enters upon a new phase, begins in fact to assume the form of
organized effort. The year 1836 inaugurated this change, while in 1837
there was something approaching an exodus from certain localities in
Western Norway. The desire to emigrate to America had also now spread
far beyond the original center, at Stavanger; the source of emigration
was transferred to a more northerly region and with it, as we have had
occasion to observe above, the course of settlement in this country is
not only directed to a more westerly region, Illinois, but also soon
extends into the northern border counties of Illinois and into southern
and southeastern Wisconsin.
As this increased immigration is historically associated with the names
of two of those whom we have already met as pioneers in New York, New
Jersey and Illinois, a brief account of their share in the promotion
of immigration from Norway will be in place. These two are Gjert
Hovland and Knud Slogvig. We have seen that the former of these came
to America in 1831, being probably the first immigrant from Hardanger.
His name deserves special mention as an early promoter of emigration
from southwestern Norway, especially from his own province. He was
a man of much enlightenment and liberalmindedness to whom America's
free institutions made a strong appeal. He wrote letters home to
friends urging emigration and these were circulated far and wide. In
one of these letters from Morris County, New Jersey, 1835, he writes
enthusiastically of American laws, and he contrasts its spirit of
liberty with the oppressions of the class aristocracy in Norway. He
advised all who could do so to come to America, where it was permitted
to settle wherever one chose, he says. Hovland was well known in
several parishes in the Province of South Bergenhus, and hundreds of
copies of his letters were circulated there; they aroused the greatest
interest among the people and were no small factor in leading many in
that region to emigrate in 1836-37.
Thus it may be noted specifically that in 1836 a lay preacher
travelling in Voss had in his possession one of Gjert Hovland's
letters, which letter was read by Nils Röthe, Nils Bolstad and John H.
Björgo and others. These three since said that it was the reading of
Hovland's letter which induced them to immigrate.[35] Gjert Hovland,
as we have seen, came to Illinois in 1835. His purchase of one hundred
and sixty acres of land in the present Miller Township was recorded
on June seventeenth of that year, the same date that the purchases of
Kleng Peerson, Nels Thompson and Thorsten Bjaaland were recorded. Gjert
Hovland lived there till his death in 1870.
[35] _First Chapter_, p. 331.
The other name, that I referred to, is that of Knud Anderson Slogvig,
who undoubtedly was the chief promoter of immigration in 1836. He had
come in the sloop in 1825, and, as we have seen, settled in La Salle
County in 1834. In 1835 he returned to Skjold, Norway, and there
married a sister of Ole O. Hetletvedt, the slooper whom we find as one
of the early pioneers of La Salle County. While there, people came to
talk with him about America from all parts of southwestern Norway; and
a large number in and about Stavanger decided to emigrate. Slogvig's
return may be said to have started the "America-fever" in Norway,
though it took some years before it reached the central and the eastern
parts of the country. It was his intention to return to America in
1836, and a large party was preparing to emigrate with him.
In the spring of that year the two brigs, _Norden_ and _Den Norske
Klippe_, were fitted out from Stavanger. The former sailed on the first
Wednesday after Pentecost, arriving in New York July twelfth, 1836. The
latter sailed a few weeks later. They carried altogether two hundred
immigrants, most of whom went directly to La Salle County. Of these two
brigs I shall speak again in a subsequent chapter.
I have above given some of the facts of Knud Slogvig's personal
history. Having already spoken of one element in the cause of
emigration I believe it will be in place to give a fuller account at
this point of the various general and special factors that have been
instrumental in bringing about the coming to America of such a large
part of the population of Norway in the 19th century.