They call it Little Sweden USA. The sign on the highway tells you so, and so does the corner of every block. A bright red Dala horse stands at the edge of Main Street, painted in folk-art curls of blue and yellow and white. Walk a block north and you can hear Handel’s Messiah carried out of the windows of Presser Hall on the Bethany College campus, where the same chorus has sung the same oratorio every Easter since 1882. There are only about 3,400 people in Lindsborg, Kansas. A tenth of them speak some Swedish.
The Place
Lindsborg sits in the Smoky Hill River valley in central Kansas, in McPherson County, roughly halfway between Wichita and Salina. The town is laid out on a grid a few blocks deep, with a low Main Street of brick storefronts running north from the railroad tracks. Beyond the town the wheat fields begin and do not really stop.
The Union Pacific line (the old Kansas Pacific) still runs along the southern edge of town. Most of the houses are modest one- and two-storey frame and brick, painted in Scandinavian whites and yellows and dusty reds. The character is small and exact, the kind of place where a stranger gets a wave from a porch.
How It Became Swedish
The Värmland Colony
In the late 1860s a young Swedish Lutheran pastor named Olof Olsson was preaching in the parish of Sunnemo, in the forests of Värmland in central Sweden. Olsson had been arguing for a more pietist, plain-spoken Lutheranism than the state church wanted, and he was tired of crop failures and tired of clerical politics. In 1868 he and a group of his parishioners helped organize a venture they called the First Swedish Agricultural Company.
The company’s plan was to buy land together in the American plains and emigrate as a colony, not as scattered families. They settled on central Kansas, where the Kansas Pacific Railway was selling tracts cheap to fill its right-of-way with farms. The First Swedish Agricultural Company secured thousands of acres along the Smoky Hill River, and on 20 February 1869 the colonists in Chicago voted to name the new place Lindsborg.
Olsson and the first wave of Värmlanders arrived on 27 June 1869. They came down from the rail stop at Salina with whatever they could carry and pitched up on raw prairie. Within months they had broken sod, dug wells, and organized a Lutheran congregation. The first sermons were preached in dugouts.
Bethany Lutheran, the Anchor
The Bethany Evangelical Lutheran Church was organized in 1869, the same year the colonists arrived. It was the spine of the new town. Olsson served as its first pastor and as the first county superintendent of schools, which in Lindsborg was effectively the same job.
In 1879 Olsson left for a teaching post in Illinois, and the pulpit passed to a younger man named Carl Aaron Swensson. Swensson was twenty-two, ambitious, and convinced that Swedish Lindsborg needed more than a church. It needed a college.
Bethany College and the Messiah
On 15 October 1881, Swensson opened a school in the sacristy of Bethany Lutheran Church with ten students. He called it Bethany Academy, and within a few years it had become Bethany College. It was the first college in Kansas to graduate women, and it was, from the start, Swedish in language and in song.
That December, Swensson and his wife Alma invited forty parishioners into the parsonage to begin learning a piece of music that most of them had never heard. Alma Swensson, an accomplished musician, taught them the words and the music of Handel’s Messiah through the winter. On 28 March 1882, the new Bethany Oratorio Society performed the Messiah in the church for the first time.
They have performed it every year since. It is now the longest continuous annual performance of Handel’s Messiah in the United States, and it is the cultural event that more than anything else fixed Lindsborg’s Swedish identity in place. To sing in the Bethany chorus, for generations of Lindsborg children, was simply what you did when you turned old enough.
The Town That Stayed
Most Swedish immigrant settlements in the American Midwest dispersed within a generation or two. Children moved to Minneapolis or Chicago for work, married outside the community, and let the language go. Lindsborg did not really do that.
The college kept young people in town and kept Swedish in the air. The Lutheran congregation kept holding services partly in Swedish well into the twentieth century. The painted Dala horses, the carved cupboards, the Christmas Lucia processions: these were not revived later as a tourism strategy. They were simply never put down.
The Landmarks
Bethany Lutheran Church (320 N Main Street). The mother church of the colony, organized in 1869 by Olof Olsson. The present building dates from the late nineteenth century. A bronze sculpture of Carl Aaron Swensson stands on the lawn, and the original sanctuary is where the Messiah was first sung.
Bethany College (335 E Swensson Street). Founded by Swensson in 1881 in the church sacristy. Presser Hall, on the campus, is where the Messiah Festival of the Arts takes place each Easter and Palm Sunday week, biennially since 1882. The college is still affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and still teaches Swedish.
Hemslöjd Inc. (201 N Main Street). Founded in 1984 by Ken Sjogren and Ken Swisher, Hemslöjd is the largest importer of traditional Dala horses outside Sweden. The shop is part import store, part woodworking studio. Craftsmen carve and paint personalized house-signs in the shape of Dala horses while customers watch.
Anderson Butik (134 N Main Street). A few doors down, Anderson Butik is the other anchor of the Swedish Main Street. It carries Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish imports: lingonberry jam, pickled herring, Swedish chocolates, books, textiles, stuffed Dala horses.
The Wild Dala Horses. Since the early 2000s, Lindsborg has commissioned dozens of large-format painted Dala horse sculptures, each by a different artist, and placed them on street corners, in front of shops, and outside public buildings. The “Wild Dala” project is the most visible single thing about the town. A walking map of them is available at the visitor centre.
The Messiah Festival of the Arts. The Bethany Oratorio Society has performed Handel’s Messiah every year since 1882, and around it has grown a two-week festival of choral concerts, instrumental recitals, and visual art exhibitions, held biennially at Bethany College.
Svensk Hyllningsfest. The Swedish honoring festival was first held in October 1941 to honor the original Värmland pioneers of 1868 to 1869. The name (Swedish for “Swedish honouring festival”) was chosen in a contest won by one Erik P. Lenander, who took home five dollars. It is held in October of every odd-numbered year and runs for a long weekend: a parade down Main Street, smörgåsbord, folk dancing by Bethany students who have been learning the steps since first grade, and a Swedish flag at every door.
Where They Came From
The original Lindsborg colonists came almost entirely from Värmland, a province of forests and lakes in central Sweden on the Norwegian border. Specifically they came from the parishes around Sunnemo and Östmark, where Olof Olsson had preached and where farm life had been hard for a generation.
The First Swedish Agricultural Company recruited from these parishes directly. Olsson and his lay partners wrote letters home through the 1870s, and chain migration did the rest: a brother followed a brother, a cousin followed a cousin, until much of the original Värmland congregation had been transplanted to the Smoky Hill valley. Smaller groups came later from Småland and Dalarna, the latter the home province of the painted horses that would later become the town’s emblem.
Lindsborg Today
The 2020 census put Lindsborg’s population at 3,776. Around thirty percent of current residents report Swedish ancestry, the highest concentration of any town in Kansas and one of the highest in the United States. The Bethany College student body is still about a thousand strong, and the town’s economy now leans heavily on heritage tourism: the gift shops, the festivals, the Old Mill and Swedish Heritage Museum.
Swedish in Lindsborg today is less a daily language than a cultural performance, but the performance is unusually serious. Children learn folk dances in elementary school for Svensk Hyllningsfest. The Bethany chorus still drills the Messiah. The Lucia procession on the second Saturday in December still brings out the candles and the white robes.
The Värmlanders who stepped off the train at Salina in 1869 would recognize a great deal of the place. The painted horses are bigger, the brick storefronts are older, the language is thinner. But Bethany Lutheran is still on Main Street, the Messiah is still sung at Easter, and there is still a Swedish flag flying outside Anderson Butik. The colony held.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Swedes settle in Lindsborg, Kansas?
Swedes settled in Lindsborg in 1869 because Pastor Olof Olsson and the First Swedish Agricultural Company organized a colony venture to emigrate together, rather than as scattered families, and bought land on the Smoky Hill River from the Kansas Pacific Railway. The colonists were almost all from Värmland and came as a Lutheran congregation.
Is Lindsborg still Swedish today?
Yes. About thirty percent of Lindsborg’s 3,400 residents report Swedish ancestry, the highest concentration in Kansas. Swedish identity in Lindsborg today is mostly cultural and ceremonial rather than linguistic, but Bethany College still teaches Swedish, the biennial Svensk Hyllningsfest and Messiah Festival continue, and Swedish gift shops anchor Main Street.
What are the most famous Swedish landmarks in Lindsborg, Kansas?
The main Swedish landmarks in Lindsborg are Bethany Lutheran Church (organized 1869), Bethany College (founded 1881), Hemslöjd Swedish Gifts and Anderson Butik on Main Street, the dozens of painted Wild Dala horse sculptures on street corners, and the Messiah Festival of the Arts held biennially at Presser Hall on the Bethany campus.
Where in Sweden did the Lindsborg Swedes come from?
The original Lindsborg colonists came almost entirely from Värmland, a forested province in central Sweden, particularly from the parishes around Sunnemo and Östmark where Olof Olsson had preached. Smaller later waves came from Småland and from Dalarna, which is the home province of the painted Dala horses that became Lindsborg’s emblem.
When did Swedes first arrive in Lindsborg?
The first Värmland colonists arrived on 27 June 1869, led by Pastor Olof Olsson. They came down by rail to Salina and walked or wagoned south into the Smoky Hill River valley, where they organized the Bethany Lutheran congregation within months of arrival.
What is the Messiah Festival in Lindsborg?
The Messiah Festival of the Arts is a two-week classical music festival held biennially at Bethany College. Its centerpiece is a performance of Handel’s Messiah by the Bethany Oratorio Society, which has been sung every year since 28 March 1882. It is the longest continuous annual performance of the Messiah in the United States.
If your family’s story passed through Lindsborg, or any of the Swedish places that made a home in the American Midwest, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a Värmland parish, to a sod dugout on the Smoky Hill, to wherever you are now.