Start  The Emigration Dalsland Stories Swedeland USA
Swedeland USA
 In 1880 there were about 65,000 Swedes living in Minnesota. People in Minnesota often referred to the area just northeast of St Paul and Minneapolis as “Swedeland USA”. This included the counties of Chisago, Isanti, Pine and northern Washington County. The area was named this because the population included the largest number of Swedish speaking rural people outside of Sweden.
When the immigrants arrived in New York they left the ship at the processing location called Castle Garden. It was used for this purpose until the buildings at Ellis Island were completed in 1892. Castle Garden was well known as a place where criminals would try to cheat and steal from unsuspecting immigrants. Ellis Island was a much easier place to keep the criminals from mixing with the immigrants.
After the immigrants registered with the government inspectors they found their way to the train station. Many immigrants had tickets on the trains that went from New York City to Chicago. Reaching Chicago they continued on the train north to Milwaukee, across Wisconsin to La Crosse and from there to St Paul, Minnesota. The immigrants most likely had steamer trunks with them so the handling of luggage must have been a considerable problem. Women and families were almost always accompanied by a man to move the luggage.
When they reached St Paul they would board the steam powered riverboat which went up the St Croix River and stopped at Stillwater, Marine Mills and other small villages. The last stop was St Croix Falls. The immigrants would leave the boat at one of the piers closest to where their relatives lived. By 1890 train tracks had been built to provide service to the area known as Swedeland.
The immigrants usually lived with their relatives for one or two years until they could earn money to buy land to farm and build their own home. The first priority was for the immigrant men to find work. The Swedes had worked in the forests of Sweden as lumbermen. The lumbering of St Croix River area was a very large industry employing hundreds of men. The industry started in 1840 and the last log to be sawed in the mills floated down the St Croix River in 1914.
James Taylor Dunn, historian of the St Croix River, writes that from 1840 to 1903 the St Croix valley produced enough lumber to build 75,000 houses. In 1879 the trees harvested averaged 55 meters in height. In the year 1890 three and a half million logs floated down the St Croix River to be cut into lumber at the sawmills. Plenty of jobs became available each winter and Swedish immigrants already skilled as lumbermen found work to earn money.
The immigrants used the money they earned working in the lumber camps to buy land for their farms. They first would build a log cabin, log barns, buy horses, cows, pigs and chickens. Then when they earned more money they would build houses and barns from lumber. Immigrants who in Sweden had only been able to rent a torp or had lived in the barn now became owners of very large farms in Swedeland USA.
Paul Wahlquist
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