BISHOP HILL AND QUAD CITY AREA

CARLSANDBURG understood like no other poet the accomplishments and courage of ordinary men and women and this made him the most loved American poet of the 20th century.

As a young man Carl Sandburg (18781967) was a milk driver, a bootblack, a soldier in the Spanish-American War, a hobo, a farmer, a door-to-door salesman, a journalist and more, before he understood his real calling.

Sandburg's popular verse was often read aloud or committed to memory by devoted fans. He was a great storyteller and a popular speaker and singer of the folksongs he collected. He is famous for his six-volume biography on Abraham Lincoln that was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for history in 1940. Carl Sandburg only wrote one novel, Remembrance Rock. His last book of poems called The People, Yes is said to be his best. According to an American literary historian "a foreigner will find more of America in The People, Yes, than in any other book we can give him". While Sandburg's autobiographical Always the Young Strangers should probably be required reading for anybody with an immigrant background.

You can still visit the little cottage near the railway in Galesburg where Carl Sandburg was born, one of seven children. His mother Clara Andersson and his father August Danielsson, who was a blacksmith, originated from the same area in Ostergöt-land but met and married in Galesburg, where about one third of the population at that time was Swedish. The town had one of the earliest Swedish.

Lutheran churches and the first Swedish language newspaper of any importance, but above all it was a railroad center with many job opportunities. Carl's hardworking father could not write but he "read his Bible after a fashion".

For most of his life, Carl Sandburg was uninterested in his Swedish heritage, but by the time of the Swedish Pioneer Centennial he was a proud Swedish American and one of the main speakers at the Jubilee together with President Harry Truman and Prince Bertil of Sweden. Carl Sandburg visited Sweden both as a newspaper reporter 1918-19 and in his 82nd year as celebrated main speaker at a Swedish American Day at Skansen in Stockholm and as a recipient of a honorary degree at the University of Up sala. He visited his parents' birthplaces in 8stergötland and also collected material about the Swedish satirist and cartoonist Albert Engström that he wanted to write a book about. Sandburg loved Engström's most popular cartoon creation, the bizarre and genial "Kolingen" a bum who was also a symbol of the freedom from conventions that Carl Sandburg always sought.

When John Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize in Literature, he said: "Of course I am glad to get it. But I wish it had gone to Sandburg. Damn it. He is America!"

Carl Sandburg is buried under a "Remembrance Rock" behind the cottage where he was born in Galesburg (at 331 East Third St., open 9-5 daily, Phone 309-342-2361).

BISHOP HILL

is the focus of this year's Swedish Immigration Jubilee celebrating 150 years since Erik Jansson and his followers founded the colony in 1846 (See SwPr Jun96). Here you really walk in the footsteps of the pioneers through what remains of the settlement that is now listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

Named after Jansson's birthplace, Biskopskulla (near Uppsala), the commune's model farm (on 10 000 acres of land) and tailors, cabinet makers, wheelwrights, toolsmiths, clockmakers and other craftsmen produced considerable wealth. A town with unusually sturdy and beautiful houses was constructed. The steeple building and many other houses were for many years the largest in the country, west of Chicago.

The "communist" community was dissolved eleven years after the murder of Eric Jansson in 1850 and the members became private landowners. Some joined Shaker colonies which were often compared to the Jansonite commune, although none had the same stately town plan and architecture as that of Bishop Hill.

Sixteen of the original buildings have survived and nine of them, that are not private residences are open to the public. There is no doubt that Bishop Hill with its130 inhabitants and 100 000 visitors a year will develop into a major tourist destination with more restaurants and gift and antique stores. The first Bed and Breakfast has now opened in the old colony hospital (309-927-3506) and more will come.

A tour of Bishop Hill should begin with a visit to the Greek Revival Steeple Building at the village green. Here you can see an audiovisual introduction to the colony as well as a lot of historic memorabilia. A permanent exhibit, "Swedes in Illinois" tells the story of the Swedish immigration through photos, letters, documents and artifacts. The building was originally intended as a hotel, but has instead served as a home, school, general store, newspaper office, bank, doctor's office and telephone exchange. The clock in the two-story tower has only one hand, because the early settlers were too busy to bother about minutes. The clock is operated by two sets of weights attached to ropes in a chute that runs down the entire height of the building.

Everything in Bishop Hill is within strolling distance and you quickly get a feel for the place.
Such time-honored skills as pottery, weaving, sewing, basket-making, broom-making and blacksmithing have been revived. There are restaurants serving Swedish dishes and stores where you can purchase traditional handiwork and imports from Sweden. Bishop Hill is open all year round ('The Bishop Hill Heritage Association, P.O.Box 1853, Bishop HIII, 11161419 Phone 309-927-3899) but if you are lucky you will arrive on Old Settler's Day (2nd Saturday in September, with the King and Queen of Sweden visiting on September 14), Agricultural Days (last fall weekend in September) or at Christmas when there are demonstrations of pioneer crafts, music and folkdancing.

OLOF KRANS is as close as we get to a Swedish Grandma Moses. The colony painter painstakingly documented the settlement and its nonsmiling inhabitants. There are some 80 paintings by Olof Eriksson Krans (18381916) on show at the Bishop Hill State Historic Site Museum at the south edge of the village. Most of them are stern portraits of hardworking men and women who seem to have no time for the lighter sides of life. There are also scenes of breaking the prairie with plows pulled by six yokes of oxen, lines of women working the earth, pioneers quickly loading the haycarts to escape an approaching thunderstorm and harvesting wheat under a a clear blue sky.

Most of his life, Olof Kranss was a housepainter in nearby Galva who e. g. painted the colony church with its imitation marble interior. He started painting the Bishop Hill scenes mostly from memory after he was fifty. Through Krans' art that is widely acclaimed, we get a personal feel for the Swedish pioneers.

VASA ARCHIVES
is a late-comer to Bishop Hill. A building was constructed in 1973 to serve as the national archives for the Vasa Order of America (see emblem on the right) which is the largest Swedish fraternity in America. The building has just been extended to make room for more material. Lillemor and Richard Horngren always welcome visitors (Monday & Saturday loam-3pm, Sunday 12 noon-4pm. Call ahead 309-927-3898) and show them around in the library, exhibit area and records room. This year as Bishop HIII celebrates its 150th year, the Vasa Order marks both its 100th year and the 500th anniversary of the birth of its namesake Gustaf Vasa.

GALVA was really named after the Swedish seaport of Gävle. The original name was changed to make it easier for non-Swedes. Galva served as the railway stop for the Bishop Hill colony that owned seventy town lots, a huge warehouse as well as a boarding house here.

ANDOVER is a small village that houses three Swedish churches. The largest is the Augustana Lutheran Church in solid brick. Next in size comes the white clapboard Methodist Church which housed the second Swedish Methodist congregation in America. The smallest of the three, but also possibly the prettiest Swedish church building in North America, is the Jenny Lind chapel. The Swedish soprano Jenny Lind donated fifteen hundred dollars towards the construction of the chapel, a huge sum at the time (when you consider that you could buy an acre of land for $ 1.25) but a small fraction of the 200 000 Jenny Lind earned, and mostly gave away to charity, for the 95 concerts she gave in the USA under the management of promoter P.T. Barnum.

Pastor Lars Paul Esbjörn had $ 2 200 when he started construction of the chapel. The task was to meet with many setbacks. First the homemade bricks were ruined by bad rains before there had been time to fire them. Then the nearby saw mill that was to supply all the lumber was washed away. Now timber had to be hauled through a swamp and when it finally reached its destination, it had to be used for coffins as cholera struck, rather than for a steeple. The chapel's basement served as a hospital and immigrant home for a long time during the epidemic that claimed the lives of Pastor Esbjörn's wife and daughter. He himself only narrowly escaped death.

It is hard to imagine those early days when you stand in the tiny chapel basement today. There is a quaint museum here and the opening that allowed overflow church visitors to listen to the sermon has been closed.

Both the exterior and interiors of the chapel are beautiful in their simplicity, making the chapel well worth a visit. The small church, only thirty by forty-five feet large, became the mother church for hundreds of other Augustana Lutheran churches in America.

Reverend Esbjbrn was the pioneer Swedish pastor in America, on loan from the Swedish church that fervently opposed emigration. In the beginning Esbj6m was seen as an emissary of the Swedish church and he was shunned by most people. Eventually he became one of the founders of the Augustana Synod, that for the next hundred years was the most important Swedish Lutheran movement in North America. In his old age Esbjörn retired to Sweden and the parish near Uppsala from where he had set out for the new world.

QUAD CITIES
is a cluster of cities on the Mississippi River. With a combined population of 380 000, Rock Island and Moline in Illinois and Davenport and Bettendorf in Iowa offer a lot of amenities of ,a large city, while maintaining a small town atmosphere. The Quad Cities are the third most important urban settlement for Swedes in Illinois, after Chicago and Rockford. Many Swedish immigrants worked for the Deere Company in Moline that is the world's largest producer of fan equipment. You can learn about the immigrants history in the Putnam Museum (1717 West Twelfth at Division phone 309-324-1933) in Davenport and at Augustana College in Rock Island while you stay at SwedishAmerican Curtis Carlson's new Radisson Hotel in Moline.

AUGUSTANA COLLEGE
in Rock Island is the oldest SwedishAmerican institution of higher learning. The college started in Chicago as a theological seminary for the Augustana Synod in 1860 when Pastor EsbJ6rn and other founders realized that it was hard to recruit clergymen from Sweden. The language of instruction during the early days was Swedish, but by 1948 the seminary and the college separated and today few of the 2 000 students have any Swedish-American background and the liberal arts college is at best ecumenical .

The "Phi Betta Kappa" college campus is beautifully located on the rolling hillsides of the Mississippi River Valley on 115 acres of land. There are some twenty-five college buildings with many Swedish names such as the "Fryxell Geology Museum". The "Old Main" building looks very much like the main building of Uppsala University, except that it is crowned with a very American dome. There is a Swedish program at the college, but most participants in the program have no direct ethnic ties to Scandinavia. The college sponsors the popular Augustana College Summer School in Sweden at the Grebbestad Folkh6gskola, located between Gothenburg and Oslo where students earn a full year of language credit in six weeks.

CONRAD BERGENDOFF
just celebrated his 100th birthday but as you can see from this month's interview (page 26-27) he is still very much at it and even has a homepage on the world wide web. Bergendoff served as president of Augustana College for twenty-seven years and really set his mark not only on Augustana and its students but on much of Swedish America with his books, articles and his remarkable energy.

THE SWENSON
Swedish Immigration Research Center is the largest and best-equipped institute of its kind. Here director Dag Blanck and assistants Vicky Oliver and Christine Johansson help researchers access more than 12 000 books and 263 microfilmed newspapers dealing with all aspects of Swedish American history. The Center is located in the beautiful Denkman Memorial Hall on the Augustana College (639 38th St., Rock Island, Il 61201-2273 phone 309-794-7443) campus close to the foreign language classrooms, language laboratories and the beautiful Wallenberg Hall (a $ 3.5 million grant for renovations was given by three foundations related to the Swedish Wallenberg family). The Center also assists those researching their family history with the aid of many microfilms collections, such as the records of more than 2 400 Swedish American churches. Nils William Olson's quarterly Swedish American Genealogist is also published by the Center. The Swenson Center was founded by brothers Birger and Lyal Swenson who also provided the initial financial support that allowed the Center to open 1981. Birger Swenson had been the manager for the Augustana Book Concern, which was the largest SwedishAmerican publishing house.

LENNART SETTERDAHL
was a resilient researcher of everything that related to Swedish America. Living in Rockford and Moline in the center of the Midwest and in the very center of Swedish emigration, he travelled around and documented the history before the sources disappeared. During the first ten years of his research, Lennart Setterdahl microfilmed Swedish American church records for the Emigrant Museum in Växjö. Then it was time for the Swedish American organizations and finally he taped interviews with the "last" immigrants - the ones who left Sweden in the 1920s. The result of his toil was an honorary doctorate at the University of Gothenburg and the fact that Swedes are, next to the Germans and the Jews, the most well-documented ethnic group in the USA. Lennart Setterdahl died in 1995 but his wife Lily in Moline is still active in Swedish American endeavors.

SWEDESBURG
has only about 90 inhabitants today but any visitor to the small community will have no doubts about their roots. There are Swedish flags on car antennas and dala horses on the front porches. The largest Dala horse welcomes visitors to the Swedesburg Museum where coffee is served from kurbits-painted pots with the inscription kaffetdren den bdsta är. Exhibits include portraits of the early pioneers and the history of the settlement.

Swedes started arriving in Iowa around 1840. Their original intention had been to follow the Illinois or Rock River to Minnesota, but with their limited command of English they ended up following the Des Moines River. Many settled around the "Swedish Highway" in New Sweden, near Lockridge. Here you can still visit the Augustana Chapel (placed in the National Register of Historic Places) as well as Methodist and Baptist churches with a Swedish-American pedigree. As the Swedish population grew even the nearby towns Mediapolis and Swedesburg became more and more Swedish.

Swedesburg was called Freeport before the Swedes took over in 1870. Four years earlier the 40 acres that constitute Swedesburg had been sold at a tax sale for $ 7.59 but never redeemed.
The Swedesburg Museum and the nearby stuga is the work of the Swedish Heritage Society (Swedesburg IA 52652-0074 phone 319-254-2317) that also celebrates Midsummer and Lucia. The legendary Christmas Table in the Community Hall has been a tradition since the1930s with 2 800 meatballs and other goodies courtesy of six pigs.