Norwegian-American Architecture By Darrell D. Henning and Kolbein Dahle
Jutulstua, from Uv, Rennebu, Sør Trøndelag, Norway, is an example of a two-three-room house drawn from a long-standing tradition. Photo courtesy of Kolbein Dahle.
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n the century from 1825 to 1925, over 800,000 persons left Norway bound for the New World. They left for a variety of reasons, but primary among them was an expanding rural population that put extreme pressure on the agricultural base of the economy. Compared to the rugged, mountainous land of Norway, dominated by forests, lakes, rivers, and fjords, North America’s seemingly limitless farmland was a lure few could ignore. So they packed their possessions and sailed for their new home. In their luggage were the tools to make textiles, food-related utensils, and the tools of the woodworker, blacksmith, and farmer. But most importantly, they brought their knowledge of how to use these tools in their traditional manner to weave, cook, farm, and construct their homes. The immigrant home embodies both a survival of tradition and an adaptation to the new physical and cultural environment that confronted the immigrant in his vesterheim, or western home. Although the immigrants settled in a variety of locations and settings, the scope of our study is limited to those who left a rural, agricultural lifestyle and sought similar circumstances in the New World. Several house types that were commonly found in the Norwegian communities established in the American Upper Midwest had their origins in the homeland. Among the first to study and describe Norwegian building traditions was Eilert Sundt in his seminal book from 1862, Om byggenings-eskikkerne på landet i Norge, where he described 26
different house types and their geographical distribution. Sundt was also interested in social differences as they related to house types.1 These included multi-generational occupation relative to the size and number of rooms of particular dwellings. Kolbein Dahle father offered a later example of this in the living arrangement of his parents’ house for the years between 1910 and 1930. . . . my parents had the main room or kitchen. One grandmother had the chamber in connection with this room, and the [other set of ] grandparents, the rooms on the other side of the entrance. Upstairs was rented away. Most people had it this way. And if the house contained rooms they did not need daily, they were used for guests, parties and receptions.2 There is little evidence that such multi-generational use was practiced often in the New World, although newly-arrived individuals or families were often temporarily put up in an established household. Usually a first-generation home continued to be occupied by the immigrant/builder; the next generation built a new and often larger home. All of the houses described have a long history in the homeland dating from as early as the Middle Ages to the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The study of rural Vesterheim