Drive twenty miles southwest of Madison and the land begins to fold. The glaciers that flattened most of the Midwest never reached this corner of Wisconsin, so the hills keep rising and falling, green and unhurried. At the centre of that rumpled country sits Mount Horeb, a village of roughly seven and a half thousand people where carved wooden trolls watch the pavement and the names on the old gravestones still read Levordson and Haugen. To understand the Norwegians in Mount Horeb is to understand how an immigrant farming district turned its heritage into an identity, and then into a destination.
The Place
Mount Horeb lies in the Driftless Area, the unglaciated pocket of southwestern Wisconsin where the terrain stayed rugged while the rest of the state was ground smooth. The village sits along U.S. Highway 151, about twenty miles from Madison, surrounded by ridge-and-valley farmland and limestone caves.
It was named in 1861 by George Wright, an English Methodist lay minister and the village’s first postmaster, who borrowed the name from the biblical mountain where Moses received the commandments. James Morrison had purchased the land back in 1849, and the settlement first grew as part of Blue Mounds Township.
The name is scriptural, but the soul of the place is Norwegian. By the close of the nineteenth century the village and its surrounding farms had become one of the most thoroughly Norwegian-American districts in Wisconsin, a state that itself drew more Norwegian immigrants than almost anywhere in the country.
How It Became Norwegian
The story does not begin in Mount Horeb. It begins a few miles east, at Koshkonong, where in 1840 and 1841 Norwegian immigrants founded what would become the largest Norwegian-American settlement in the United States. The first arrivals came from Numedal and Stavanger, and within a few years they were joined by parties from Telemark and Sogn.
The Koshkonong overflow
By the 1840s several hundred Norwegians had settled the Koshkonong region of eastern Dane and western Jefferson counties, an area that grew to include Stoughton, Cambridge, Deerfield and Cottage Grove. By one count the settlement held 543 families, some 2,670 people, before the decade was out.
That density mattered. When new immigrants stepped off the boats at Quebec or New York and asked where the Norwegians were, the answer pointed them toward Dane County. Land near Koshkonong filled quickly, and the surplus of arriving families pushed west and south into the Blue Mounds country, where Mount Horeb would rise.
Andrew Levordson and the first families
In 1871, Andrew Levordson became the first Norwegian immigrant recorded as settling in Mount Horeb itself. He was not alone for long. Through the 1870s and 1880s a steady stream of Norwegian families took up the surrounding ridges, drawn by the same chain that had filled Koshkonong: a letter home, a cousin already established, a known parish of neighbours.
The pattern was older than Mount Horeb. As far back as the 1850s, an immigrant from Telemark named Osten Olson Haugen had claimed forty acres in the valley just west of the village, near Blue Mounds. Telemark families clustered together in the Driftless valleys much as they had clustered in the old country, recreating something of the social map of home.
The railroad and the village proper
Mount Horeb the village took shape when the railroad arrived in the early 1880s and a commercial centre formed around the depot. The 1900 census counted only 864 residents in the village, but the surrounding township was overwhelmingly Norwegian, and the village served as their market town, their church town and their gathering place.
By that 1900 census, roughly three quarters of the village’s population traced its descent to Norway, many of them from the rural settlements ringing the village. Shopkeepers, blacksmiths, butter makers and clergy were as likely to be Norwegian as the farmers who came to town on Saturdays.
Lutheran life and the rhythm of the year
The Lutheran church sat at the centre of that life. It set the calendar of confirmations, funerals and harvest suppers, and it was often the first institution a Norwegian district built once it had cleared enough land. Norwegian remained the language of worship in many congregations well into the twentieth century.
Heritage organisations followed. The Vennelag Lodge of the Sons of Norway, lodge number 5-513, held its first meeting in January 1971 and was chartered that November with 83 members. Vennelag means “circle of friends,” and the lodge has spent half a century teaching the crafts that came over with the immigrants: bunad sewing, Hardanger embroidery, rosemaling and the baking of lefse and krumkake.
The bypass and the trolls
The turn that made Mount Horeb famous came not from the founders but from their descendants, and it came out of fear. When the state rerouted the highway in the 1980s, bypassing the village, downtown merchants worried the traffic would never come back.
They already had a head start on a solution. In the mid-1970s the owners of Open House Imports, a Scandinavian gift shop on East Main Street, had brought in a pair of large rubber trolls from Norway. One of them, Troll Odin, took up residence on the pavement and became the first troll on what locals now call the Trollway.
Through the 1980s a local woodcarver added life-size wooden trolls to draw visitors off the bypass and into the shops. The Chamber of Commerce leaned into it, and the village rebranded itself the Troll Capital of the World. Today more than forty hand-carved trolls line Main Street, a folk-mythology marketing campaign that quietly doubled as heritage preservation.
The Landmarks
The Driftless Historium, 100 South Second Street. Home of the Mount Horeb Area Historical Society, founded in 1975 to collect and share the stories of southwestern Dane County. Its galleries braid together the Norwegian immigrant experience and the geology of the Driftless landscape, and it works with local families to preserve heirlooms brought from Norway.
Open House Imports, 308 East Main Street. A Scandinavian gift shop opened in 1966 and housed in an 1893 Victorian. This is where the trolls began: the imported Troll Odin out front was the seed of the entire Trollway. Inside you will still find imported Norwegian food, sweaters and rosemaled woodenware.
The Trollway, Main Street. More than forty carved trolls stationed along the village’s central street, each with a name and a character. Conceived to lure traffic back after the 1980s bypass, the Trollway has become the village’s signature and the reason most visitors first hear of Mount Horeb.
Mt. Horeb Community Center, 107 North Grove Street. The meeting place of Vennelag Lodge 5-513 of the Sons of Norway. Here the lodge runs its baking workshops, its Kaffe Stue and its classes in bunad construction and Hardanger embroidery, keeping immigrant crafts in living hands rather than glass cases.
Schubert’s, 128 East Main Street. A restaurant has stood at this address since former butter maker Otto Olson opened one in 1911, and for generations it traded under the Schubert name, known for Swedish rye bread, Norwegian meatballs and deep-fried rosettes. The diner closed in 2021 after decades in the family, but the building remains one of Main Street’s oldest continuous eating houses.
The Norway Building, formerly at Little Norway, Blue Mounds. In the valley between Mount Horeb and Blue Mounds, the Chicago businessman Isak Dahle built a model Norwegian farm village in the early 1930s and called it Little Norway. Its centrepiece was a stave-style hall first raised in Norway for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The attraction closed in 2012, and the Norway Building was dismantled in 2015 and shipped home to Norway.
Cave of the Mounds, near Blue Mounds. A National Natural Landmark a few miles from the village, its limestone formations are a product of the same Driftless geology that shaped the farms above. It is a reminder that the Norwegians who settled here chose a landscape, not just a market town.
Where They Came From
The Norwegians of the Mount Horeb district came overwhelmingly from the mountain and fjord regions of southern Norway: Telemark above all, alongside Numedal, Sogn and Stavanger. These were the same valleys that had filled nearby Koshkonong, and the overflow carried their place-of-origin loyalties with them.
That mattered because Norwegian immigrants tended to settle by parish and by valley. A family from Telemark looked for a ridge where Telemark neighbours had already broken ground, so that the dialect, the dances and the rosemaling patterns matched. The Driftless valleys, narrow and self-contained, suited that habit of clustering.
Behind the migration lay hard arithmetic. Norway’s farmland was steep and limited, its population growing, its inheritance customs leaving younger sons without land. Wisconsin offered acreage that a family could actually own, and the early settlers’ letters home, the famous “America letters,” turned a trickle into a flood. By the time Andrew Levordson reached Mount Horeb in 1871, the route was well worn.
Mount Horeb Today
The 2020 census counted 7,754 residents, a village many times the size of the 864 recorded in 1900. The German share of ancestry has grown over the decades, and Norwegian descent now sits behind it in the raw numbers, but the public face of the village remains unmistakably Norse.
That public face is partly performance and the residents know it. The trolls are a 1980s invention, the rebrand a response to a highway. Yet the performance rests on something real: an immigrant settlement that was genuinely three-quarters Norwegian, a Lutheran calendar that ordered farm life for generations, and a Sons of Norway lodge that still teaches the old crafts to anyone who turns up on a Tuesday.
What the village has done, in effect, is choose to remember out loud. The Driftless Historium keeps the documentary record. Vennelag Lodge keeps the hands-on skills. The Trollway keeps the visitors coming, and their dollars help fund the rest. For a place that easily could have faded into a Madison commuter suburb, Mount Horeb has held onto its story with unusual deliberateness, which is its own kind of authenticity. You can read more on the village’s own recorded history.
The pattern Mount Horeb shows is the Wisconsin Norwegian story in miniature, and it rhymes with its neighbours. Just east lies Stoughton, the heart of the old Koshkonong settlement, while across the Mississippi the same Telemark and Sogn migration shaped Spring Grove in Minnesota and Decorah in Iowa. Far from the Midwest, the same emigration filled Ballard in Seattle and the fishing port of Petersburg, Alaska. And Wisconsin’s immigrant map runs deeper still, taking in the Hmong of Eau Claire and the Poles of Stevens Point.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are the Norwegians in Mount Horeb so prominent?
Mount Horeb grew out of the overflow from the Koshkonong settlement, the largest Norwegian-American community in the United States, founded nearby in 1840 and 1841. By the 1900 census roughly three quarters of the village’s residents were of Norwegian descent, and that heritage still defines the town.
When did Norwegians first settle in Mount Horeb?
Andrew Levordson is recorded as the first Norwegian immigrant to settle in Mount Horeb itself, arriving in 1871. Norwegian families had been farming the surrounding Blue Mounds country since at least the 1850s, when Telemark immigrant Osten Olson Haugen claimed land in the nearby valley.
Why is Mount Horeb called the Troll Capital of the World?
The trolls began in the mid-1970s when Open House Imports brought a pair from Norway and set one on Main Street. After the highway was rerouted around the village in the 1980s, merchants commissioned carved trolls to draw visitors back, and the village rebranded itself the Troll Capital of the World.
Where did the Norwegians in Mount Horeb come from?
They came chiefly from the valleys of southern Norway, especially Telemark, along with Numedal, Sogn and Stavanger. These were the same regions that had settled nearby Koshkonong, and immigrants tended to follow neighbours from their home parish into the same Wisconsin valleys.
Can you still experience Norwegian heritage in Mount Horeb?
Yes. The Driftless Historium tells the immigrant story, the Vennelag Lodge of the Sons of Norway teaches crafts such as rosemaling and Hardanger embroidery, and the Trollway lines Main Street with more than forty carved trolls. Shops like Open House Imports still sell imported Scandinavian goods.
What happened to Little Norway near Mount Horeb?
Little Norway was a living-history museum of a Norwegian farm village, built in the early 1930s by Chicago businessman Isak Dahle in the valley between Mount Horeb and Blue Mounds. It closed in 2012, and its centrepiece, the 1893 Norway Building, was dismantled in 2015 and returned to Norway.
If your family’s story passed through Mount Horeb, or any of the places Norwegians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a steep farm in Telemark to a ridge in the Driftless Area, to wherever you are now.