A Place to Call Home Norwegian Small Towns on the Western Prairie By Odd S. Lovoll
Pacific Avenue in Benson, Minnesota,1895. It marks the more prosperous south side of town. Photo courtesy of Swift County Historical Society.
istorian Lewis Atherton, in his Main Stream on the Middle Border (1954), describes the country town as “a community in which people speak to one another as they pass along the street and a stranger is recognized as such the minute he arrives.” The federal census, limited as it is to a numerical interpretation of society, on the other hand, defines towns of 2,500 or fewer citizens as rural. They are, in other words, an integral part of the surrounding agricultural landscape. Historians of the West, scholars like Oliver Knight, have, however, generally disregarded population figures in defining urban places: “It is,” Knight writes, “the substance of an urban place—the function that it performs regardless of size—that will open our vision to the reality of the town on the frontier.”1 A long-standing interest in the country town and rural conditions induced me to make a systematic investigation of
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Vol. 11, No. 1 2013
three “Norwegian” country towns in west-central Minnesota, published in 2006 as Norwegians on the Prairie: Ethnicity and the Development of the Country Town. The selected towns were Starbuck in Pope County, Benson in Swift County, and Madison in Lac qui Parle County. They were all, from the start, commercial centers and became urban in their social, cultural, and commercial design and function. A strong Norwegian presence has been a distinguishing characteristic throughout their history – in 1900 from 43 percent in Benson, to 56 percent in Madison, and 70 percent in Starbuck. Only Benson of the three surpassed a population of 2,500, and then only in the 1930s. Large Norwegian farming communities existed in their environs.2 Norwegians exhibited a special bond to life in the country town and to farming. In 1900, 49.5 percent of all Norwegianborn “heads of household” were engaged in farming as 11