On a windy afternoon in southwest Iowa, you can hear the sails before you see them: a deep, rhythmic creak as four canvas-and-lath wings, sixty feet across and painted Danish red and white, turn above a town of six hundred people. The windmill grinds wheat into flour the way one did in Denmark in 1848, because it is the same windmill. Forty years ago the people of Elk Horn took it apart on the far side of the ocean, shipped it home in numbered pieces, and put it back together by hand. There is nothing else quite like it in America.
The Danes in Elk Horn built the largest rural Danish settlement in the United States, and they have spent a century and a half refusing to let it fade into the corn. This is the story of how they got here, and why they stayed Danish.
Elk Horn: The Place
Elk Horn sits in Shelby County in the rolling farmland of southwest Iowa, about six miles north of Interstate 80 and roughly an hour and a half drive northeast of Omaha. The town covers less than a square mile, paired with neighboring Kimballton nine miles away as the two “Danish Villages.” The housing stock runs to modest early-twentieth-century frame houses and farmsteads on the surrounding section roads. The name comes from Elk Horn Creek, and from the antlers early settlers found shed in the local timber.
How Elk Horn Became Little Denmark
Before the Danes
This corner of Iowa opened to homesteaders only after the Civil War, and it came late to settlement compared with the river towns to the east. A small Wisconsin colony put down roots a couple of miles southwest of the present town site in the 1860s, and Caroline Whitney Winters, the area’s first postmistress, is credited with suggesting the name after the elk antlers in the creek timber. When the first Danes arrived, much of the prairie was still unbroken and, crucially, still affordable. That single fact, cheap land available in quantity, would shape everything that followed.
The Danes Arrive
Danish immigrants began reaching Iowa in numbers in the 1870s, part of a larger wave pushed out of a small country with too little farmland to go around. Denmark’s defeat in the 1864 war with Prussia and Austria, which cost it the southern duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, left many families looking west for a future. Others left after converting to Baptist, Methodist, or Mormon faiths that set them apart from the Lutheran establishment at home.
They concentrated in Audubon and Shelby counties for a practical reason: open farmland was still to be had here long after it had filled up elsewhere. Christian and Mary Jensen, who came from the Hindsholm peninsula on the Danish island of Funen around 1868, chose this stretch of country in part because the gentle, rolling land reminded them of home. Word traveled back across the Atlantic in letters, and the chain pulled tight. One family’s success became the reason a cousin, a neighbor, an entire village’s worth of young people booked passage to the same few townships.
That chain migration is the whole engine of the place. People did not scatter randomly across the Midwest; they followed names they trusted to land where someone they knew was already established. By 1882, Hans Jensen Jorgensen had bought the farmland that became Kimballton, the second of the two villages, and Danish was the language you heard in the fields, the stores, and the pews.
Elk Horn at Its Peak
The settlement’s cultural high point arrived early. In 1878, the immigrant teacher and writer Kristian Ostergaard founded the Elk Horn Hojskole, the first Danish folk high school in America. Modeled on the adult-education academies that the churchman N. F. S. Grundtvig had inspired back in Denmark, it taught history, song, and Danish language and lore to young adults rather than children. Over the years an estimated two to three thousand Danish men and women passed through it, and the school became a magnet, drawing still more Danes to the two villages.
The folk school also sat at the fault line of a quarrel that split Danish America in two. Followers of Grundtvig, who prized Danish language, hymn-singing, and a warm, this-worldly faith, became known as the “Happy Danes.” Against them stood the Inner Mission movement, the “Holy Danes,” who held drinking and dancing improper and put personal salvation above the old culture. When the Danish Lutheran church in America formally divided in 1894, the rupture ran right through Elk Horn and Kimballton. In 1894 the folk school itself was sold to the newly formed church body for use as a seminary; that seminary moved on in 1896 and eventually merged into Dana College in Blair, Nebraska.
Through the early decades the villages grew steadily, knit together by Danish Brotherhood lodges, Lutheran congregations, and a calendar of Danish festivals. Immigration to the area peaked around 1920, and Elk Horn’s own population climbed toward its high of 746 in 1980. For a long stretch, this was simply a Danish-speaking pocket of Iowa where the old country’s customs were not heritage but everyday life.
The Change
What changed was what changed everywhere in the rural Midwest. The Danish language thinned with each American-born generation. Young people left for the cities, farms consolidated, and the small-town main street that had supported its own banks and stores grew quieter. By the late twentieth century the question facing Elk Horn was the one facing a thousand prairie towns: how to keep a place alive when the economy that built it has moved on.
Elk Horn’s answer was unusual. Instead of letting the Danish past recede into a few family names, the town decided to make its heritage the thing that kept it standing. It is the same instinct that turned the Danish town of Solvang, California into a tourist destination, though Elk Horn took a plainer, less postcard-perfect path to it. The windmill was the first and boldest move in that strategy, and it worked.
The Landmarks of Elk Horn
The Danish Windmill stands at 4038 Main Street, and it exists because one man would not let an idea go. In the 1970s Elk Horn resident Harvey Sornson made several trips to Denmark, fell in love with the old smock mills there, and came home convinced his town should have one. A grist mill built in 1848 in the village of Norre Snede, by then long out of use and badly deteriorated, was identified as a candidate, and the Danish government allowed the sale. In a matter of days the town raised the roughly $30,000 needed to buy, dismantle, and ship it. A Danish craftsman took it apart, numbered every piece, and built a scale model to guide reassembly; the parts arrived on trucks in February 1976, and more than three hundred local volunteers rebuilt it without professional help. It remains the only authentic working Danish windmill in the United States, and after the sale Denmark passed a law forbidding the export of any more of its mills.
The Museum of Danish America grew out of a 1983 effort to give Danish immigrant history a national home, and the founders chose Elk Horn precisely because of its density of Danish descendants. The Elk Horn Lutheran Church donated twenty acres for the site, and the museum opened to the public in June 1994 as the Danish Immigrant Museum, taking its current name in 2013. Its galleries hold more than forty-six thousand artifacts, including the comedian and pianist Victor Borge’s first piano and a Danish Immigrant Wall of Honor, all set in the thirty-acre Jens Jensen Prairie Landscape Park.
The museum’s Family History and Genealogy Center, on Main Street in Elk Horn, opened in 1996 and is the reason many visitors come at all. Danish-Americans drive in from across the country to trace a great-grandparent back across the Atlantic, leaving with a town, sometimes a farm, where their line began. It is a heritage town doing the literal work of reconnecting families to their roots.
Bedstemor’s House, whose name means “Grandmother’s House,” is a 1908 Victorian on the National Register of Historic Places, furnished to show how a Danish-American family lived in the early twentieth century. It carries a quietly sad story: the immigrant Jens Otto Christiansen built it for the woman he hoped to marry, and after she turned down his proposal he never lived in it himself.
Nine miles north, the Little Mermaid has sat in the fountain at Kimballton’s city park since 1978, a bronze replica of Edvard Eriksen’s famous Copenhagen statue, paid for by a local group of “Progressive Danes.” It is the kind of gesture that defines these villages: an immigrant town spending its own money to plant a piece of the homeland on the Iowa prairie. The Elk Horn Hojskole itself is the ghost on this list, the 1878 folk school that drew thousands and then closed, surviving now in the cultural habit it left behind.
Where the Elk Horn Danes Came From
The Elk Horn and Kimballton Danes came overwhelmingly from rural Denmark, from the islands and the Jutland countryside where farming was the life and land was scarce. Funen, the island home of the early Jensen family at Hindsholm, was one such source, and the broader migration drew from villages across Zealand and the Jutland peninsula. These were people leaving small holdings and crowded parishes for a country that still had room.
The reasons clustered into three. Some left because the 1864 war had carved Schleswig and Holstein out of Denmark and unsettled the nation’s confidence. Some left as religious dissenters, Baptists and Mormons and Methodists who no longer fit the Lutheran mainstream. And many simply followed the letters home, the chain of kin and acquaintance that turned a few Iowa townships into the most Danish rural ground in America. One immigrant who passed through Iowa, Christian K. Nelson, even went on to invent the chocolate-coated ice cream bar later sold as the Eskimo Pie.
Elk Horn Today
Elk Horn today is a town of about six hundred people that has bet its future on its past, and so far the bet is holding. The windmill still turns and still grinds flour you can buy at its base. The Museum of Danish America remains a genuine national institution improbably planted in a tiny farm town, drawing scholars, tourists, and family-history seekers up the gravel-shouldered county roads.
The Danish calendar still structures the year. Tivoli Fest fills the streets over Memorial Day weekend with a parade, music, and tables of aebleskiver and medisterpolse, and Julefest brings the town together again at Thanksgiving for glogg, pastries, and the lighting of the season. Danish-style bakeries and cafes keep kringle and open-faced smorrebrod on the menu, and the heritage tourism that flows through has nudged a few newcomers to buy houses and open businesses of their own.
None of this is preserved under glass. The descendants of Christian Jensen and Harvey Sornson are still here, still hosting the festivals, still climbing into the windmill to set its sails to the wind. Across the upper Midwest, other Scandinavian settlements made the same wager, from the Swedes of Lindsborg, Kansas to the Norwegians of Decorah in Iowa’s northeast corner. Elk Horn did not inherit its Danishness so much as keep choosing it, year after year, and that choice is what now carries the town forward.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Danes settle in Elk Horn, Iowa?
Danish immigrants began arriving in southwest Iowa in the 1870s because affordable farmland was still available in Audubon and Shelby counties long after other regions had filled up. The gently rolling country also reminded settlers of home. Once a few families succeeded, chain migration drew relatives and whole villages to the same townships, making the Danes in Elk Horn the largest rural Danish settlement in the country.
Is Elk Horn still a Danish town today?
Yes. Elk Horn and neighboring Kimballton remain the most concentrated rural Danish-heritage community in the United States, and more people of Danish ancestry live in this area than in any other rural community outside Denmark. The town hosts the national Museum of Danish America, an authentic Danish windmill, and Danish festivals at Memorial Day and Thanksgiving.
What are the most famous landmarks in Elk Horn?
The best known is the Danish Windmill at 4038 Main Street, built in Denmark in 1848 and rebuilt in Elk Horn by volunteers in 1976. Other landmarks include the Museum of Danish America, the 1908 Bedstemor’s House on the National Register of Historic Places, and the Little Mermaid statue in nearby Kimballton’s city park.
Where did the Elk Horn Danes come from in Denmark?
They came mainly from rural Denmark, from the islands such as Funen and Zealand and from the Jutland countryside, where farmland was scarce. Some emigrated after Denmark lost Schleswig and Holstein in the 1864 war, and others left as religious dissenters. Letters home then pulled additional family and neighbors to the same Iowa townships.
When did Danes first arrive in Elk Horn?
Danish settlers reached this part of Iowa in the late 1860s and arrived in real numbers through the 1870s, with families like Christian and Mary Jensen settling the countryside around 1868. The folk high school followed in 1878 and the village of Kimballton was founded in 1882. Immigration to the area peaked around 1920.
If your family’s story passed through the Danish Villages of Iowa, through a folk school classroom, a Lutheran pew, or a farm bought because the land looked like home, that history is worth tracing back to the town and the parish where it began.