Next, rare American history.

You know about the English and the Dutch colonists, too.

But did you know the Swedes settled here as well?

- This is a typical farmstead that would have been built in the New Sweden Colony after 1638.

Discover the fascinating history of the New Sweden Colony.

Where was it, and what happened to it?

And why does it play a major part in the legacy of Abraham Lincoln?

Drive By History starts now.

[Music] Made possible by the Preserve New Jersey Historic Preservation Fund, administered by the New Jersey Historic Trust, State of New Jersey.

Every day, thousands of motorists pass by countless history markers and say to themselves, “One of these days, I'm going to stop and read that.

One of these days I'm going to find out what happened and why it mattered.” Well, this is that day.

- Im headed to a history marker that talks about a lost colony.

- No, not Roanoke.

- This one was on the Delaware.

- Surprised?

I was too.

- You hardly ever hear about it.

- I'm Ken Magos, and this is Drive By History.

[Music] Today's investigation begins in Pennsville, New Jersey about 35 miles south of Philadelphia.

The township is named for William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania and a champion of American freedom.

William Penn arrived in the region in 1682, a long time ago.

However, the history were exploring today makes even William Penn seem like a relative newcomer.

- And here's the history marker.

It says, New Sweden, the first permanen European colony in the Delaware Valley, was founded in 1638 at Fort Christina, now Wilmington, Delaware.

Peaceful relationships with the Lenape Indians made possible the acquisition of land, including present day Salem County, New Jersey.” - Now I'm going to jump down to the bottom of the sign.

“These courageous men, women and their descendants contributed to the development of the Delaware Valley, State of New Jersey, and the foundation of America.” - Now, this takes us back to 1638, a good 50 years before William Penn.

I'm off to find out more.

[Music] Before England ruled the colonies, some of the East Coast was governed by the Dutch.

You probably knew that.

But, did you know parts were settled by the Swedes, too?

To find out more, Im off to the Guggenheim Library, housed in the former summer estate of Murry and Leonie Guggenheim, on the campus of Monmouth University, where Drive By Historys Anthony Bernard is discovering that our nation's earliest history has ties to Stockholm and Scandinavia.

- Hey, Anthony, how are you doing?

- Ken, how are you?

- Good to see you.

- What's going on?

- Hey, I just came from a history marker that talks about New Sweden, a colony that was settled by the Swedes in what is now New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware.

- Now, Im always looking for local histories that fit into the national narrative.

- But I don't think of Sweden in the context of colonial America all that much, or really at all.

- What can you tell me?

- This is certainly a history that you don't hear much about.

But in the 1600s, Sweden was a global power.

- Really?

On the Order of England or France?

- Yes, surprised to hear that, aren't you?

- I am, I admit it.

- I think most Americans are surprised by that.

- Of course, today Sweden holds its own on the global stage.

- But there was a time when Sweden was a major military and political force in the world.

- Do tell.

- For this history, we need to go back to 1523.

- The history marker talked about the 1600s.

- We'll get there.

- From the very late 1300s until the early 1500s, so roughly the late medieval period, three Scandinavian countries -- Denmark, Sweden and Norway -- formed an alliance known as the Kalmar Union.

- And from the way you're talking about it, I'm guessing that that alliance falls apart.

- Exactly.

- By the 1500s, Denmark had emerged as the richest country in northern Europe and, as a result, the balance of power in the Kalmar Union became skewed.

- It tilted toward Denmark.

- Sweden, meanwhile, had serious mineral resources, especially copper.

- They had mined copper as well as silver since the Viking times and, as the years went by, Sweden felt that that contribution wasn't valued, not as it should be.

- So the Swedes felt subordinated by Denmark.

- Right, and as the decades go by, other divergences emerge: taxes, military campaigns, even who should sit on the throne.

- Divisive issues.

- So all told you have resentment smoldering.

- Smoldering resentment.

- I like that we're keeping that one.

- Now, this is a complex history and I'm really simplifying it.

- But it all comes to a head with something called the Stockholm Bloodbath.

- Bloodbath -- I can tell that's bad just by the sound of it.

- In 1520, the new King of Denmark, also the King of Sweden, executed something like 80 of his Swedish enemies after summoning them for a conference.

- Well, that's dirty pool.

- Very dirty.

- They were detained, tried as heretics.

- Some were beheaded, others hanged.

- Really ugly stuff.

- And you already had smoldering resentment, as you said.

- That turns into rage, I'm sure.

- In 1523, there's an uprising.

- Sweden breaks away, crowns its own King, and kicks the Danes out permanently.

- So Sweden stands alone.

- It does.

- Now, Sweden has those vast mineral resources, but it also has a short growing season.

- So Sweden relies heavily on trade.

- And if you look at this map, you can see that's a problem in 1523.

- Denmark holds a lot of the coast.

- Yep, and Denmark controls the streets near Copenhagen.

- The nations are openly hostile toward one another now.

- Sweden feels the need to take control of their circumstance, and they do that by getting bigger, building the military, acquiring more territory -- are you following all that?

- Yep, I am.

- That's good, because that's where the next leg of this investigation begins.

[Music] To find out more, Anthony sends me to South Philadelphia to the American Swedish Historical Museum, the oldest museum of its kind in the United States.

Im met by the Museum's curator Christopher Malone, and University of Pennsylvania professor emeritus Dr. Kim-Eric Williams, also four time governor of the Swedish Colonial Society.

Together, they take me on a private tour of the museum, focusing on its New Sweden collection.

First stop, the museum's map room, where I'm surrounded by a spectacular work of cartography.

It shows Sweden and neighboring areas of northern Europe during the Age of Exploration.

There's a lot to take in, but the flames all over the map catch my attention first.

- You'll see little fires burning, and those are different industrial places, including the copper mines at Falun, where a lot of people worked and lived.

- Sweden had great resources, so it was possible for them to develop their industry.

- Okay.

Historians believe Swedens robust metal industry, combined with the relatively newfound independence that Anthony talked about in the library, are two of the driving factors for what came next.

- Yes, I think they for so long had really chafed under the rule of Denmark that they were just looking for some way to finally have a chance to have control of their destiny and their country.

Sweden believed its destiny was greatness.

- Yeah, so the Swedes are really trying to become a world power, just like the Dutch and the English.

And with the other great nations of Europe establishing colonies in the Americas, it seemed fitting for Sweden to do the same.

However, by the time Sweden was ready to set sail, the English and the Dutch had already laid claim to much of the East Coast.

Getting a piece of the colonial pie wasn't going to be easy.

Enter the colonial governor of New Amsterdam.

- Well, it was Peter Minuit who had been here before.

- He knew the whole coast from Connecticut down to Maryland.

That's the same Peter Minuit, sometimes pronounced Peter Min-you-it , who purchased Manhattan for the Dutch.

If it seems strange that he also navigated the beginnings of New Sweden, suffice it to say, by 1637 he had a falling out with his Dutch employers.

- So you had someone who had been on the South River, who knew the territory, who comes to Sweden and said, “I can start a trading post for you, I know how to do it.” The former governor selected sparsely occupied territory along the Delaware River, known as the South River at the time.

Although the Dutch said they owned that land, too, they didn't have the manpower to stop him from installing the Swedes there.

By 1637, his plan was falling into place, and the New Sweden Colony was ready to go.

Just one small problem: no Swedes.

- The biggest problem in the New Sweden Colony was to get people to emigrate.

- It was very difficult to find volunteers.

- People didn't really want to leave.

- So then who emigrates?

- Well, in the beginning it was only soldiers.

- It was a trading post.

- The purpose was to get the money out of North America, not to be a colony.

The plan was simple: exchange European manufactured goods such as cloth, tools and weapons for furs and skins provided by the indigenous.

- Beaver furs, and beaver fur was made into hats, and that was super popular in the late 17th century.

At the time, beaver hats were an essential aspect of fashion across much of Europe.

Demand was insatiable, and as a result, in parts of Europe, beavers had become almost extinct.

In North America, however, they were plentiful.

New Sweden recognized the opportunity and the profit potential, which was enormous.

- That then made their relation- ship with Lenape crucial.

- They needed to formulate this working relationship with the Lenape to get the furs to then bring back to, to Europe.

As a result, settlers were needed to live in the New Sweden colony permanently to maintain and advance those relationships with the indigenous and also create a sense of permanence.

But again, finding emigrants was not easy.

- So it was very difficult to get colonists.

- They heard all sorts of bad things about America.

- You could be killed.

- There was no hospitals, there was no churches.

- Why would you go there?

- Finally, they discovered that there was one group in Sweden who wanted to leave, and they were the Forest Finns.

The Forest Finns were woodland people from Finland with their own distinct culture.

However, they lived within the borders of Sweden.

- They had been living in Sweden for more than 100 years, but they had slash and burn agriculture.

At that time, slash and burn agriculture was a widely used method of growing food.

Essentially, land was clear cut than any remaining vegetation was burned.

The resulting ash provided a nutrient rich layer to help fertilize crops.

- And the part of Sweden they lived in in Värmland was also rich in minerals.

- And so the people doing their slash and burn agriculture were in competition with the miners who needed charcoal from the forest.

Charcoal was the preferred fuel source for blast furnaces.

It generated greater heat than wood, which mattered to the people refining ores.

If that gets a little confusing, suffice it to say, the Forest Finns and the industrialists clashed over the land.

Industry won and the Forest Finns left.

The remarkable thing, however, is that Native Americans in the region lived in similar fashion to these Forest Finn settlers.

The indigenous also practiced a type of slash and burn agriculture.

There were other similarities too.

- They both had the sweat lodge or the sauna.

- They were people of the woods.

- They carved, they hunted together, so these were perfect immigrants.

Celebrated by this tapestry that hangs in the museum.

New Sweden's relationship with the indigenous is an important aspect of this history.

Unlike the Dutch and English who experienced conflict, the Swedes did not.

- They had a respect for them, which you don't find among the Dutch and the English.

- In fact, there was a question among European theorists about whether the Native Americans could be considered a part of the human race or whether they were a lower level.

Respect for the indigenous wasn't the only characteristic that set New Sweden apart.

- They never developed a town.

- They were farmers to begin with.

- They wanted land.

- That was, that was what was valuable.

- So they spread out from Trenton all the way down the Delaware Bay.

In the 1600s, Swedish homesteads dotted that entire region.

And there was something very culturally unique about them.

Unlike those of New England, the homesteads in New Sweden were built in a circle.

- It was the most practical way, because you could keep an eye on everything that was going on.

- You could see that the goats were over here, the sheep were here.

- If the cows were loose, you knew that.

New Sweden had a distinctive appearance.

You can almost imagine it, all those homesteads laid out in a circle.

For three and a half centuries.

all you could do is imagine it.

In the late 20th century, however, that changed, and it's where this investigation leads me next... to a recreation of a New Sweden farmstead currently standing in Tinicum Township, Pennsylvania, just south of the Philadelphia Airport.

- This is a typical farmstead that would have been built in the New Sweden Colony after 1638.

- They were almost all built in the same way, in a circle like this.

- But this is a recreation?

- This is a recreation.

- It was built in 1988 to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the New Sweden colony, and they brought two Swedish carpenters who were experts at Swedish log techniques.

- And they built it to show what life was like.

- So who would have been living in a farmstead like this?

- Well, it would have been an extended family.

As we tour the farmstead, Kim-Eric suggests stepping inside a few of the buildings.

He tells me the interiors are authentic, too.

- All right, so what is this structure?

- Well, this is the main residence, and this is where the family at the farmstead would have lived, in this building.

- All right, let's go take a look.

- Im curious to see inside.

- It's really beautifully done.

- I can see how they would have assembled this with all the different logs.

[Music] - So one of the things I notice immediately in this space is this fireplace.

- This seems very modern to me.

- I could see this in a house today.

- Well, of course, because even modern architects, you know, want to copy this 16th century, 15th century idea.

- And this is what sets apart a Swedish structure from all the rest.

- Swedish and Finnish structures always had the chimney in the corner.

- That way the heat came into the room.

- It was also not on the floor.

- It was up so that the person cooking was not going to hurt their back.

Conversely, the English typically placed their fireplaces in the center of a wall, with the fire burning close to the floor.

The layout left something to be desired.

- The English fireplaces had all the heat going up the chimney.

As an interesting side note, Kim-Eric told me that historians often rely on the placement of the fireplace if, during an excavation, they discover living quarters from the colonial period.

- Today, if we look at old colonial structures, we can always tell a Scandinavian one if there's a corner fireplace -- that gives it away.

In addition to the fireplace, there's another point to be made, and one that my modern sensibility finds hard to fathom.

- And the house that you see now probably would have no problem with having 13 people in it, and they would all be living in this one room.

- So they all lived in this one house.

- In this one house.

As we continue our tour, Kim-Eric suggests stepping inside another structure, the blacksmith shop.

He tells me every farmstead in New Sweden had one.

- Well, it was really important for their everyday life to have iron and luckily there was in South Jersey especially bog iron -- also in Pennsylvania.

- And they were used to using that in Sweden.

- If they needed a new ax, they needed a plow, they could make all of those things.

Blacksmiths were so essential to colonial life, the English and Dutch sometimes offered incentives, hoping one would settle nearby.

In New Sweden, it wasn't necessary.

- They knew how to blacksmith things.

- So a lot of these folks came over with this skill set in place.

- Yeah, yeah.

Although farmsteads such as this one could be found all over New Sweden, Kim-Eric tells me this recreation is located in Tinicum Township for a very special reason.

- Well, because this was the capital of New Sweden.

- Right here.

- Yes.

If the name is familiar, it's because Tinicum is also the site of the Lazaretto, the nation's first quarantine station in 1799.

However, in 1643, it was where Johan Printz, the longest serving governor of New Sweden, resided.

His manor house was said to have rivaled the finest homes in the colonies.

- So I'm curious, then, did New Sweden thrive under Governor Printz?

- Well, at first they did.

During his tenure, seven expeditions made up of more than 300 emigrants sailed from Sweden.

Printz also arranged amicable relations with English settlers and directed several commercial enterprises within New Sweden.

During that same period, conflicts closer to home forced Stockholm to redirect resources away from New Sweden and toward military efforts in Europe.

Financial support for the colony started to fade.

At the same time, the Dutch installed Peter Stuyvesant as the latest Director General of New Netherland.

He was determined to retake the lower Delaware Valley for the Dutch.

For that part of the story, we go back to the Museum.

- In 1655, they came with their warships.

- They had more soldiers than there were colonists.

- And so the colony fell without... almost without bloodshed.

- There were a few people who died.

Although that would seem like the end of the story, in some ways it's the beginning.

Most of the history detailed so far took place in what is today Pennsylvania and Delaware.

How did Swedesboro and the legacy of New Sweden cross the river and end up in New Jersey?

- The Dutch really had no way of operating New Sweden, so they gave the Swedes and Finns self-government, which they called the Swedish Nation.

Though no longer governed by Stockholm, the area remained culturally Swedish, and it stayed that way for generation after generation.

- And as these people are looking for more land, it occurs to some of them that they should go to new Jersey.

The migration was hastened by events in the second half of the 1600s, when the entire region changed hands again, this time falling to England.

- So by the 1680s, when the Quakers are coming and are infiltrating all of Philadelphia, southeastern Pennsylvania and Chester, that whole area, there's room in New Jersey.

Descendants of those New Sweden colonists put down strong roots in New Jersey.

Although they intermarried and became first citizens of Great Britain and then citizens of the United States, they held onto their Scandinavian culture.

100 years later, a scholar named Israel Acrelius surveyed the entire region and found that in many ways it remained solidly Swedish.

- And so he finds that families in the Philadelphia area, in the Delaware area and in New Jersey -- Swedesboro particularly -- these people are still culturally Swedish a hundred years later.

Israel.

Israel Acrelius published his findings in a book aptly titled A History of New Sweden .

He was largely looking for cultural transmission, and found evidence of it farther and wider than he ever could have imagined.

He wrote, “the influence of that movemen is still felt not only upon the shores of the Delaware, but upon the banks of the Mississippi and the Great Lakes of the North, and from the Gulf of Mexico to the California shores of the Pacific Ocean...” These findings lead to the final stop on my tour: Swedesboro, New Jersey.

[Music] - All right, so what have we got here?

- Well, would you believe a log cabin in New Jersey?

- Wow.

- So is this similar to what you see in New Sweden, then?

- It is very similar, but it's not quite the same.

- Okay.

- But you can tell that the same log technology that the Swedes introduced in the 1630s here is being used in the 1750s.

Construction techniques used to build a Swedish log cabin are very distinctive.

- Well, you see how well the logs are placed together, how carefully, and then, especially when you come to the corner, you see them notching where they're dovetailed together completely, so that there's no space at all even though they're at a corner.

This log cabin, which now sits permanently in the shadow of the Old Swedes Church, is said to be one of the oldest original log cabins of early Swedish architecture still standing in the United States.

But what matters more is that it was built in 1750.

- What it does is it allows us to see that the log cabin technology lived on after the end of the New Sweden Colony, through the Dutch period, and the English period up until the 1750s which is when this farm building was built.

That's a textbook example of cultural transmission.

Log cabin woodworking, brought to North America by the Swedes, is being adapted by other people living in the area.

People who were not Swedish.

And it endured long after the New Sweden colony collapsed.

- So, it is not historic only because of its age.

- It's historic because of the technology involved in building this... - Right.

that originally came from the Swedes.

Right.

- Right.

- And then it was transmitted through other cultures.

Right.

- Right.

- That's just fascinating.

This specific example of cultural transmission is particularly important because as one generation melted into the next, a very Swedish design came to be viewed as a very American design.

- And as people moved across the Appalachian Mountains, they took this technology.

- Obviously, we know it ended up in Illinois because... - Abraham Lincoln was not born in a tent.

- He was born in a log cabin.

- This is true.

- And it was the same technology and it went all the way to the Rockies, to the Pacific.

[Music] - You don't hear much about this history, and it played such an important role in America's past.

Today, log cabins are one of the most recognized symbols of our nation's pioneering spirit.

And as the day draws to a close, I find myself reflecting on this unexpected yet powerful connection, that a very American symbol is rooted in New Sweden.

As I said earlier, this is a colonial story that we don't hear much about yet it's closely intertwined with frontier history that we do often hear about.

New Sweden helped write a piece of the American narrative.

I mean that figuratively.

However, when I asked about a massive piece of art on display at the museum, I discovered that could be taken literally, too.

- So, the painting depicts John Morton, who was a descendant of the New Sweden Colony signing the Declaration of Independence.

- Swedes really assimilated into American society.

- They became peers with people like Benjamin Franklin, and they really contributed to America's founding.

See you next time.

Made possible by the New Jersey Historical Commission.