Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1942, Síða 16

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LE NORD
at Philadelphia or Boston. But before long New York became
the principal port of entry. From there they went on to the West
by rail or by ships across the Great Lakes to the North-Western
States. While the first Danish immigrants had to cross the Atlantic
in English or German boats, a Danish trans-Atlantic service,
known as the Thingvalla Line, and later on as the Scandinavian
American Line, was established in 1879 and continued in existence
till 1936.
Most of the Danish immigrants scattered over the whole of
the vast expanse of the North American continent like chaff in
the wind, and as early as 1870 there were Danish-born in-
habitants in all the Territories and States of the Union. Most
of them, however, settled down in the Central States — about
the Great Lakes and the prairie districts — where there are nowa-
days few towns of any size without Danish inhabitants.
With a few exceptions in the State of New York, no Danish
settlements in the proper sense of the word were formed East
of the Alleghanies and South of the Ohio. Nearly all the older
Danish settlements were found in the States of Michigan, Wis-
consin, Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa, North and South Dakota,
Nebraska, and Utah, in addition to a few in Kansas and
California.
The first Danish settlement in the Central States was founded
in 1845 in Waushara County, Wisconsin, and during the next
few years several others were established in the forests of Wis-
consin. These, in their turn, became the starting points of coloniza-
tion in Michigan and Illinois, and from there the westward move-
ment proceeded across the prairies and to the Territories in the
West: Iowa, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. The Wisconsin Danes
were among the founders of the largest Danish settlements in
the U.S.A.: Clark’s Grove in Minnesota, Viborg in South Dakota,
Elk Horn in Iowa, and Dannebrog in Nebraska. Several of these
migrations, which took place in covered waggons, were under-
taken under the leadership of Baptist or Unitarian ministers. The
Danish farmers carried with them the co-operative movement,
and in 1890 they established the first co-operative dairy in the
Central States: that of Clark’s Grove.
In California Danish immigrants began to arrive as early as
the i84o’s, though it was not until the 1880’s that they became
sufficiently numerous to found congregations of their own. About