(soft music) - When George Washington and Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson were starting this new country called the USA in 1776, this was not part of that country.

Minnesota was the land of the Dakota and the Ojibwe.

- All of the early immigrants that came to Clay County, they may not have come with the founding fathers, but they earned their place as Americans.

It was a hard time over in Norway and the rest of Scandinavia, much of Europe.

There was a lot of poverty.

The population was growing rapidly, and there simply wasn't enough land for everybody to have a farm or a small property.

(soft piano music) Fyresdal all is a rugged land.

It's very rocky.

The fjords are gorgeous, but it wasn't ideal for farming.

It wasn't a great place to live.

And they needed somewhere to go.

(waves splashing) The first Norwegian immigration was in 1825, the slooper, the restoration, landed in New York.

So Norwegians have been here ever since 1825.

Most of those stayed on the East Coast and then eventually kind of made their way to Wisconsin.

(soft guitar music) The farmland absolutely attracted people to the Midwest.

The government was giving away land.

- Abraham Lincoln signed a law in 1862 called the Homestead Act, that said, if you come out to the edge of the American frontier, wherever that happens, it'd be at the time, and you pick government owned land that nobody's claimed yet, and you live here for five years and you build a house and you make improvements, at the end of five years, we'll give you 160 acres of land for free.

This was very much beyond the frontier, the very edge of America.

- The farmland was some of the best in the country.

Clay County has very fertile land, the Red River Valley, and so that was what really drew people here.

(soft guitar music) So there were the push/pull factors of immigration and the push were those natural things, the farming, and then the pulls were letters coming from people who had immigrated decades ago, or more recently, sending letters back about how amazing the farmland was, how beautiful the country was, how you could make it regardless of what you had.

Another pull was the railroad.

So the Northern Pacific Railway would send advertisements to countries trying to draw people to the land so that they could settle it, so that they would have settlements as they started building the railroad.

- We have some of the first Euro-American settlers coming to live here.

1859, we had Randolph Probstfield.

- He was a booster, as we see from his own agricultural operation in his land acquisition.

He worked very hard to get that land into production.

He developed a statewide reputation for his experimentation with fruit, vegetables, even wheat.

He was a wheat producer, as well as selling fruits and vegetables to local residents.

That got him into politics, because of the economic problems of the late 19th century on the Plains.

Railroad brought the settlers to the plains.

They came with expectations of prosperity on this rich agricultural land.

But the railroad also put 'em in a world market, so wheat prices fluctuated, and also the income did not match the production costs.

So he became involved in politics.

He was part of the Granger movement in the 1870s, Farmer's Alliance Movement in the 1880s, and the populous movement in the 1890s.

I think he brought some of those ideas from Germany, because when he immigrated, the Rhineland was a hotbed of political ideas, and so on, that had come from the French Revolution.

- The Northern Pacific Railway is building west from Duluth, and once the railroad arrives, that's what brings real settlement.

Around here, mostly it's immigrants.

About 75% of those immigrants are Scandinavians.

The Red River Valley, this borderland between Minnesota and North Dakota, Northwestern Minnesota, this is probably the most Norwegian place in the world outside of Norway.

(soft violin music) - Olav and Tone Thortvedt, they left Fyresdal in 1862.

They were part of a mass immigration from Fyresdal.

A couple hundred people left in that year.

So when they first arrived in Clay County in 1870, they came across the Red River and they actually ran into Randolph Probstfield, and they had not been totally happy with what they were seeing.

They were gonna go to Otter Tail County and he brought them to the spot in Moland Township on the Buffalo River.

(soft music) They became the Buffalo River settlement.

They stayed there for 150 years almost.

They cared so much about their history, both their Norwegian and their American history.

(soft music) - American holidays were a huge deal.

4th of July was almost like Christmas, where they would put games together in the old Thortvedt yard.

I think also was a way for them to show assimilation.

I think that was a big part of it.

And it was a great way to meet the neighbors.

You know, and again, more social than we probably are today.

- Levi was one of their children, and he became important figure in Clay County in the early Norwegian settlements.

He was instrumental in developing some of the Norwegian community that exists here and existed there as were Olav and Tone - Olav and Tone Thortvedt, the leaders of the Buffalo River settlers, their granddaughter or Orebelle Thortvedt, is one of the Red River Valley's most important local historians.

She was a local historian and an artist.

Used her art to illustrate history.

She was an obsessive documenter of local history, especially the history of the Buffalo River settlement.

- Everyone knew who the Thortvedts were.

They were never rich, they were never wealthy, but they were successful in building a community and creating ties and roots that ran really deep.

There were 132 people in Clay County when the Thortvedts arrived, spread out over the whole county.

By 1885, there were 11,000 people.

(soft music) The Yeovil Colony was what ended up being an unsuccessful settlement.

They came from Somerset in England, and they were drawn by the railroad.

George Rodgers, reverend, he had come and visited the area and he went back and started telling everyone about this promised land in Minnesota, a beautiful farmland.

You could succeed at anything.

And he convinced a lot of people from the community of Yeovil in Somerset to make the journey.

1872, 73, there was about 200 people that came.

They were promised paradise, and they arrived in the middle of a blizzard.

They still sent for their families.

A lot of their wives and children came.

They tried farming.

A lot of the people weren't traditionally farmers.

They were coming from trades.

A lot of them didn't make it.

They moved on to somewhere else.

And even though it wasn't successful, it's still very important to the development of the community of Hawley.

And I think it offers an interesting contrast to the Thortvedts who were so successful and started this Norwegian community that lived on for so long.

(soft music) - Winnipeg Junction is a really interesting and unique settlement just on the farthest east part of Clay County.

It is a Scandinavian immigrant settlement.

The reason why it exists is because of the railroad.

The railroad needed to make a connection to Canada.

They plotted it out in 1897, even though people were living in the area already.

Just made it a town.

Became Winnipeg Junction officially in 1900.

At the peak was 260 residents.

Based on the census records that we have, most of them were first generation Scandinavian immigrants, or if they say they were born in Minnesota, their parents were born in Sweden or Norway.

Why would they be attracted to a place like Winnipeg Junction?

There's a lot of opportunity here.

Ole Gol was one of these primary movers in town.

He seems to definitely be a character of someone looking for opportunity.

If you own the local watering hole, you kind of know everybody's business.

He bought and sold property very quickly, which, you know, on paper looks very shady.

Obviously anywhere along a railroad where there's new towns that pop up, you get to write the story for what that town looks like and how it forms.

Why archeology is a really interesting component to the story is we get to see the things and we have evidence of just daily life around Winnipeg Junction.

We're seeing direct archeological evidence of them not only fighting the railroad, 'cause that's what ultimately led to their demise, but also fighting the unregulated market of food and medicine consumption.

So we have a lot of medicinal bottles.

We have a lot of liquor bottles, and we have, one of their favorite things was this ketchup, big Sunnyside ketchup fans.

Apparently we have a lot of ketchup bottles.

So connecting the artifacts from their lives and helping kind of build the stories of these people who came through.

(soft music) This small town died out because the railroad had messed up.

The railroad had three geologic problems, actually.

One was the ancient glacial Lake Agassiz coming out of Fargo-Moorhead.

The grade was too steep.

It was costing too much money to pull trains up out of the valley.

The second one was navigating the Buffalo River.

They had too many trestles going over the Buffalo River and the third is very swampy ground, one mile east of town.

And so the tracks kept sinking and they kept having to build up the tracks.

In 1906, they had announced that they were going to move the track one mile north and fix the grade going into Hawley, effectively shutting off this boom town.

When that happened, the Winnipeg Junction residents actually fought back.

They sued them.

This little boom town in West Central Minnesota made national headlines about whether or not the railroad could effectively kill their town.

They lost, ultimately.

This town that you've never heard of has made national headlines, and most of those headlines were small town in Minnesota to be wiped off the map.

(soft violin music) It's changed so much in 150 years.

We're a much more diverse community and farmland, as far as the eye can see, and I think the Thortvedts started that, and the other Scandinavian immigrants.

I don't think they'd imagine some of the large scale farms that exist today.

There's something where the generation of immigrants that first comes often wants to kind of forget their heritage, where they come from, they're in this new country.

And then the next few generations really embrace that cultural heritage.

(soft violin music) - [Narrator] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008, and by the members of Prairie Public.