They called it Bishop Hill, after Biskopskulla, the parish in Uppland where their prophet had been born. In the autumn of 1846, a few hundred Swedish farmers and weavers stood on a treeless stretch of Illinois prairie and started digging dugouts into a creek bank. Within five years there were more than a thousand of them, eating from common pots, praying in a common church, and trying to build the New Jerusalem on the flat black earth of Henry County.
The colony lasted fifteen years. The village it left behind is still here.
The Place
Bishop Hill sits in north-central Illinois, in Henry County, about three hours west of Chicago and forty miles east of the Mississippi. The population today is around 125. The grid of the original colony is intact, with low brick and frame buildings facing a central park where the Janssonists once held open-air services.
You leave the interstate, drive through corn and soybeans for fifteen minutes, and the steeple of the old Colony Church rises out of the prairie almost the way it would have in 1850.
How It Became Swedish
The Trouble in Sweden
The story does not begin in Illinois. It begins in the 1840s in northern Sweden, in the provinces of Hälsingland, Uppland, Västmanland, Gästrikland, and Dalarna. There, a wheat-flour dealer named Erik Jansson started preaching that the Church of Sweden had abandoned the gospel and that the truly faithful could live without sin.
His followers, mostly farmers and lay readers known as läsare, met in private homes for Bible study. This was illegal under Swedish law, which gave the state Lutheran Church a monopoly on public religious gatherings. Jansson burned Lutheran hymnals and devotional books in bonfires. He was arrested several times. By 1845 the persecution was sharp enough that he and his closest disciples decided to leave for America.
The Crossing, 1846
Jansson sent an emissary, Olof Olsson, ahead to scout for land. Olsson chose a section of unbroken prairie in Henry County. In the summer and autumn of 1846, the first wave of roughly 400 Janssonists crossed the Atlantic and made their way by canal, lake, and oxcart to the site Olsson had picked.
They named it Bishop Hill, an English calque on Biskopskulla, Jansson’s birth parish. By the time the migration tapered off in the early 1850s, around 1,500 Swedes had made the trip. Many died on the way, of cholera on the boats and of fevers in the first crowded winters in the dugouts.
The Colony at Its Peak
Bishop Hill was communal from the start. Everything belonged to everyone. Meals were eaten together in long halls. Marriages were arranged in mass ceremonies. Children were raised by the community. By 1850 the colonists had broken 700 acres of prairie sod, built a flour mill, two sawmills, brick kilns, and a three-storey frame church that could seat the whole colony.
The women did the field work in long blue dresses and white kerchiefs, planting corn in straight lines that became one of the most famous images of the colony. The men built the brick houses and dug the canals. Bishop Hill produced its own brooms, linen, wagons, and bread, and traded with neighbouring counties for what it could not make.
The Murder of Erik Jansson, 1850
On 13 May 1850, Erik Jansson walked into the Henry County courthouse in Cambridge, a few miles east of the colony. A disaffected colonist named John Root, who had married Jansson’s cousin and then been refused permission to take her out of the community, climbed the courthouse stairs and shot him dead in the courtroom. Root was tried, convicted of manslaughter, and served roughly a year in prison.
Jansson was forty-one. The colonists kept his body in the church for days, expecting him to rise again.
The Slow Dissolution, 1850 to 1861
After the murder, leadership passed to a board of seven trustees. The colony kept building. The Björklund Hotel went up in 1852, the Steeple Building in 1854, and a colony school followed shortly after. But the religious fervour that had bound everything together had been buried with Jansson.
Bad investments, lawsuits, and disagreements over property finally broke the commune. Between 1858 and 1861 the assets were divided among the surviving members, each adult receiving a share of land, livestock, and tools. The Janssonist experiment was over. The village stayed.
The Landmarks
The Colony Church, Bishop Hill and Maiden Lane. Built in 1848, two storeys of whitewashed frame with brick-filled walls. The ground floor housed colonists in small rooms. The sanctuary, on the second floor, has two long aisles and a centre pulpit, designed so men and women sat on separate sides during Jansson’s services. It is the oldest surviving building in the colony and the heart of the historic site.
The Steeple Building, Main and Bishop Hill Streets. Finished in 1854 in a Greek Revival style, with a wooden tower bearing a one-handed clock that shows only the hours. Begun as a hotel, the Steeple Building later served as a school, a bank, apartments, and the colony’s administrative office. It is now the colony museum and houses the Bishop Hill State Historic Site’s interpretive exhibits.
The Björklund Hotel, Main Street. Built in 1852 to lodge visitors and prospective colonists arriving from Sweden and from Chicago. Three storeys of brick with a wide front porch. Behind it stood the colony’s bakery and dairy. The hotel later passed to the Björklund family after dissolution, and the name stuck.
The Colony Store, Bishop Hill Street. Two-storey brick, built in 1853 as the colony’s commissary and trading post. It still operates as a shop today, selling Swedish foods, textiles, and folk crafts. Walk in and you can stand on floorboards the colonists laid.
The Olof Krans collection, Steeple Building Museum. Olof Krans arrived at Bishop Hill in 1850 as a twelve-year-old boy. Decades later, after recovering from a fall in 1896, he began painting from memory the people and scenes of his childhood in the colony. He finished more than ninety pictures before his death in 1916. Ninety-nine of his works, including portraits of fellow colonists and the famous scenes of women planting corn in formation, are now in the State Historic Site collection at the Steeple Building.
The Bishop Hill Cemetery, north edge of the village. Erik Jansson is buried here, along with hundreds of the original colonists. The headstones are mostly small and plain, in keeping with the communal ethic. Names like Olsson, Jansson, Björklund, and Norberg repeat down the rows.
Where They Came From
The Janssonists were not a cross-section of Sweden. They were almost entirely from a cluster of provinces in the country’s north and centre. Hälsingland sent the largest single contingent. Smaller groups came from Uppland, Västmanland, Gästrikland, and Dalarna. Erik Jansson himself was from the parish of Biskopskulla, in Uppland, southwest of Uppsala.
These were farming districts where the pietist Reader movement had taken hold most deeply, and where the conflict with the Church of Sweden was sharpest. Many of the families who left came as whole households, sometimes whole villages, selling what they had at home and travelling together. Their letters back, describing fertile land cheap enough for ordinary farmers to own, helped trigger the much larger Swedish emigration of the 1860s, 70s, and 80s that filled the upper Midwest.
Bishop Hill Today
Bishop Hill is small. The 2020 census put it at 125 people, on a one-square-mile village footprint. The colony grid is mostly preserved, run jointly by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources as the Bishop Hill State Historic Site and by the local Bishop Hill Heritage Association. The village was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1970 and designated a National Historic Landmark District in 1984.
It is not a living immigrant community in the way Andersonville in Chicago or Lindsborg in Kansas still are. The Janssonist movement is gone. The Swedish-American families who remain are descendants, not new arrivals. What you find in Bishop Hill is a frozen-in-time village kept up for visitors and for the descendants who come back each year for the festivals.
Those festivals are the lifeblood. Jordbruksdagarna, or Agricultural Days, falls on the last weekend of September. Volunteers in colony-era dress make rope, press cider, forge metal, and demonstrate how the women shelled corn and pressed bricks. Julmarknad, the Christmas market, runs the last weekend of November and the first weekend of December, when the colony buildings open their doors for Swedish baking, candles, and the Lucia procession. Smaller markings of Valborg in April, Midsummer in June, and Julotta on Christmas morning round out the calendar.
For the descendants who drive in from Iowa, Minnesota, and the Chicago suburbs each September, Bishop Hill is the place where a particular Swedish story in America began. The Janssonists themselves left almost no biological lineage by design, since many of them had been celibate or in arranged unions during the commune years. But the village they built is still here, and the larger Swedish migration they triggered is woven into the whole upper Midwest.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Swedes settle in Bishop Hill, Illinois?
Bishop Hill was founded in 1846 by Erik Jansson and roughly 400 of his followers, who were fleeing religious persecution in Sweden. Jansson preached a pietist doctrine that put him at odds with the state Lutheran Church, and his followers were prevented from holding lay Bible meetings under Swedish law. They came to Illinois to build a utopian religious community on cheap prairie land.
Is Bishop Hill still Swedish today?
Bishop Hill is a National Historic Landmark District of about 125 residents, many of them descendants of the original colonists. It is a preserved heritage village rather than a living immigrant community. Swedish traditions are kept up through annual festivals, the State Historic Site, and the Bishop Hill Heritage Association, but it is not a place of ongoing Swedish migration.
What are the most famous Swedish landmarks in Bishop Hill?
The Colony Church (1848), the Steeple Building (1854), the Björklund Hotel (1852), and the Colony Store all survive from the original Janssonist settlement. The Steeple Building houses the Bishop Hill State Historic Site museum, including the largest collection of paintings by colony folk artist Olof Krans.
Where in Sweden did the Bishop Hill colonists come from?
The Janssonists came mostly from the provinces of Hälsingland, Uppland, Västmanland, Gästrikland, and Dalarna in north and central Sweden. Hälsingland sent the largest contingent. Erik Jansson himself was from the parish of Biskopskulla in Uppland, which is where the colony’s English name comes from.
When did Swedes first arrive in Bishop Hill?
The first group of around 400 Janssonist colonists arrived in the summer and autumn of 1846. The migration continued through the early 1850s, with about 1,500 Swedes in total making the journey to Bishop Hill before the colony was dissolved in 1861.
What happened to the Bishop Hill colony?
Erik Jansson was murdered in 1850 by a disaffected colonist, John Root, at the Henry County courthouse. The colony continued under a board of trustees until financial troubles and internal disputes led to a gradual dissolution between 1858 and 1861, when communal property was divided among the surviving members.
If your family’s story passed through Bishop Hill, or any of the Hälsingland and Uppland parishes that sent people to the Illinois prairie, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From Biskopskulla to Bishop Hill, to wherever you are now.