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Norsemen Deep in the Heart of Texas: Norwegian Immigrants, 1845–1900

Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The great majority of the half-million Norwegian migrants who traveled to the United States in the nineteenth century settled in the Midwest. A small minority, however, headed for Texas. Employing Norwegian- and English-language sources, Gunnar Nerheim, professor emeritus of modern history at the University of Stavanger, has written a detailed and meticulously researched history of this group. Interestingly, two pivotal figures in early Norwegian migration to the United States ended up in Texas: Johan Reinert Reiersen, who in 1845 established the settlement Normandy (Brownsboro) in Henderson County, and Cleng Peerson, who in the early 1850s helped catalyze Norwegian migration to Bosque County, northwest of Waco. Inspired by the cultural geographer Robert Ostergren's study of Swedish chain migration and by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz's method of thick description, Nerheim employs prosopography to tell the collective history of Norwegians in Texas. In Texas, it turns out, Norwegians' attitudes toward slavery and to the Confederacy depended largely on their timing and place of arrival, with settlers in east Texas showing more enthusiasm for the Confederate cause than those farther west in Bosque County. Remarkably, even though only a tiny minority of Norwegian Americans became enslavers, indentured servitude played a significant role among the group even into the twentieth century. In a pattern of chain migration, young persons from Hedmark County in southeastern Norway paid for passage across the Atlantic by laboring for Norwegian farmers in Bosque County. In Nerheim's estimate, this type of servitude was quite benign and might have even constituted a “golden opportunity to get a better start in life” (p. 260). One of the author's “most unexpected findings” is that a clear Norwegian American ethnic identity survived in Texas into the twentieth century (p. 307).
DOI: 10.1093/jahist/jaaf173
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7117250281
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