Drive north out of Elk Horn on Highway 173, past the corn and the soybean rows, and the land does something quietly improbable. A bronze mermaid is sitting on a rock in the middle of a small Iowa town, gazing out across the prairie as if the nearest ocean were not a thousand miles away. This is Kimballton, population somewhere near 274, and the story of the Danes in Kimballton is written in that statue, in the white frame churches at either end of town, and in the smell of æbleskiver on a May morning.
Together with neighbouring Elk Horn, three miles to the south, Kimballton anchors what is reliably described as the largest rural Danish settlement in the United States. More people of Danish descent live in these few square miles than anywhere else outside Denmark itself.
The Place
Kimballton sits in Audubon County in the rolling country of south-west Iowa, roughly sixty miles east of Omaha and nine miles north of Interstate 80. It is small by any measure, less than a square mile of streets, with a population the 2020 census put at 291 and which has drifted gently downward since.
The town was named not for a Dane but for Edward Kimball, a railroad employee, when the line reached the area in the 1880s. Yet almost everything that makes Kimballton worth a detour came from the families who got off that train and the ones who never needed it, having walked over from the farms nearby.
What you notice first is how legible the Danishness is. It is not a gift-shop overlay. It is in the church architecture, in the surnames on the war memorial, in the recorded fairy tales you can dial up by telephone in the city park.
How It Became Danish
Why Iowa, and why here
Danish emigration rose through the 1870s and surged in the 1880s, driven by a familiar combination of crowded farms at home and cheap land abroad. A particular bitterness sharpened it. In 1864 Denmark lost the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein to Prussia and Austria, and many families from the Schleswig borderlands chose emigration over life under German rule.
Most of the Danes who reached Iowa came from Jutland, the long peninsula that forms the Danish mainland, along with the Schleswig districts just to the south. They arrived in the south-west of the state for a plain reason: when the heaviest Danish migration began in the 1870s, this was where farmland was still available and affordable.
Audubon and Shelby counties, around Elk Horn and Kimballton, became the heart of it. The first arrivals wrote home, and the letters did the rest. Chain migration brought brothers, cousins and whole village congregations across the Atlantic, so that by 1900 the area was densely, recognisably Danish. The same pattern played out wherever Danes gathered in numbers, from the brickyards of Danish Racine in Wisconsin to the windmills of Solvang in California.
A town built on a quarrel
Kimballton owes its very existence, in part, to a theological argument. In 1894 the Danish Lutheran church in America split into two factions that everyone understood as rivals long before the lawyers got involved.
On one side stood the followers of Bishop N. F. S. Grundtvig, who believed faith should be joyful and bound up with Danish song, folk culture and education. They became known, only half in jest, as the Happy Danes. On the other stood the Inner Mission party, pietistic and serious about sin and salvation, who broke away to form what was called after 1896 the United Church. These were the Sad Danes.
In the Elk Horn and Kimballton area the United Church kept possession of the older church buildings. Some of the Grundtvigian members, left without a home, gathered in Kimballton instead. For a time they met in one another’s farmhouses, or outdoors when the weather allowed.
In 1896 they bought land and put up a forsamlinghus, an assembly house, to serve as both temporary church and community hall. The very layout of religious Kimballton, with one tradition at one end of town and the other at the opposite, is the geography of that 1894 schism made permanent.
The carpenters and the founders
The men who built this town were, very often, the same men who farmed it. Hans Jensen Jorgensen opened the first post office in 1883, the act that historians treat as the town’s founding. Kimballton was formally established in 1888 and incorporated in 1908.
Skilled Danish craftsmen left their fingerprints everywhere. Nis P. Hjuler, a Danish carpenter and cabinet-maker, built the Bethany church and carried Danish decorative joinery into its woodwork. Niels Hansen and Jens Rasmussen built Immanuel. Jens T. Larsen, another craftsman, gave his name to a small towered house on Main Street that still stands.
These were not anonymous labourers. They were named, remembered men whose work the National Register of Historic Places would eventually catalogue, and whose surnames still appear in the local phone book.
Keeping it Danish
What set the Elk Horn and Kimballton Danes apart was their determination not to melt quietly into the American middle. The Grundtvigian instinct for folk education ran strong here.
Three miles south in Elk Horn, Danish immigrant Kristian Ostergaard founded the Elk Horn Højskole in 1878, the first Danish folk high school in America. It drew students from Danish communities across the country and made this corner of Iowa a cultural capital for Danish America, a place where the language and the songs were deliberately, lovingly preserved.
That impulse is why, generations later, schoolchildren here still learn to fold æbleskiver batter and why the road signs greet you in two languages.
The Landmarks
The Little Mermaid Statue and Sculpture Garden, Kimballton City Park. The Progressive Danes of Kimballton bought a replica of Copenhagen’s famous Little Mermaid in 1974, a tribute to Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale. When the original cast deteriorated, the community raised money to recast her in bronze, and she was rededicated in 2008 during the town’s Quasquicentennial. Artist Troy Muller added eight more bronze sculptures of Andersen’s tales, each with a telephone number you can call to hear the story read aloud.
Bethany Danish Evangelical Lutheran Church. Built in 1898 by the Danish carpenter Nis P. Hjuler, this T-shaped frame church with its central entry tower is one of the purest survivals of Danish immigrant craftsmanship in Iowa. A 1906 addition served as a schoolhouse. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on 3 October 1991.
Immanuel Danish Evangelical Lutheran Church. The Grundtvigian congregation that met in homes after the 1894 split finally built their own church in the north-west of Kimballton in 1904, the work of Niels Hansen and Jens Rasmussen. It stands as the physical answer to the assembly house of 1896, the Happy Danes’ permanent home in town.
Jens T. Larsen House, 103 Main Street. Built in 1894 by and for a skilled Danish craftsman, this one-and-a-half-storey frame house carries a T-plan, wall dormers and a small square tower that nods, faintly, to the old country. It was listed on the National Register on 3 October 1991 for its association with the Danish settlement.
The General Store Museum. Formally the Bennedsen, Boldt, and Hansen Building, this 1913 commercial structure on the main street preserves the world of the Danish-run small-town store. It was added to the National Register on 3 October 1991 and now keeps that mercantile history under one roof.
The Danish Windmill, Elk Horn. Three miles south, the most famous landmark of the Danish Villages is a sixty-foot working mill built in Nørre Snede, Denmark, in 1848. In 1976 it was dismantled, shipped to Iowa, and rebuilt by community volunteers, an act of communal labour that says everything about how seriously this place takes its heritage.
The Museum of Danish America, Elk Horn. The national museum of Danish-American life sits within a thirty-acre prairie park designed in the spirit of the landscape architect Jens Jensen. Its galleries of exhibits make the Villages a pilgrimage site for Danish-Americans tracing their families back across the water.
Where They Came From
The Danes of Kimballton came overwhelmingly from Jutland and the contested Schleswig borderlands, the rural heart of Denmark where farming families faced shrinking holdings and, after 1864, the unwelcome prospect of German rule.
They were not, for the most part, the desperate poor. Many were farmers and tradespeople with enough resources to make the crossing as families, which is why early Kimballton filled with households rather than with single men. The folk-school culture they brought with them, the Grundtvigian love of song and learning, travelled in their luggage as surely as their carpentry tools.
Some came directly from Denmark. Others arrived by way of earlier Danish settlements in Wisconsin and elsewhere in the Midwest, drifting west as the open land filled in, until the prairie of Audubon County offered them a place to stop. They were joined in Iowa by other tightly knit immigrant farming communities, from the Dutch of Orange City to the pietists of the German Amana Colonies, each holding onto its own old country in the middle of the corn.
Kimballton Today
Kimballton today is small and getting smaller, in the way of many rural Iowa towns. The young leave for Des Moines and Omaha, the school consolidated in 2014 into the Exira-Elk Horn-Kimballton district, and the population has slipped below three hundred. None of that is unusual on the Great Plains.
What is unusual is how hard the town works to stay itself. Every Memorial Day weekend, Tivoli Fest fills Elk Horn and Kimballton with æbleskiver and medisterpølse, Danish folk dancing, Viking demonstrations and the smell of frying batter. The Little Mermaid still keeps her watch in the park, recast and rededicated, refusing to rust away.
The churches still stand at their opposite ends of town, the quarrel of 1894 softened now into mere architecture. The windmill still turns down the road. For a place this size, Kimballton holds onto an extraordinary amount of memory, and it does so on purpose, with telephone fairy tales and a heritage festival and a museum that draws visitors from across the country looking for the names of their own grandparents.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are there so many Danes in Kimballton, Iowa?
The Danes in Kimballton are the result of heavy Danish emigration in the 1870s and 1880s, when farmland in south-west Iowa was still cheap and available. Chain migration from Jutland and Schleswig brought whole families and congregations to Audubon County, making Elk Horn and Kimballton the largest rural Danish settlement in the United States.
What is the Little Mermaid statue in Kimballton?
It is a bronze replica of Copenhagen’s Little Mermaid, honouring Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale. The Progressive Danes of Kimballton first installed it in 1974, recast it in bronze, and rededicated it in 2008. It anchors a sculpture garden of eight more Andersen-themed bronzes by artist Troy Muller in the city park.
What is the difference between the two Danish churches in Kimballton?
The split goes back to the 1894 division of the Danish Lutheran church into the Grundtvigian Happy Danes and the Inner Mission Sad Danes. The Grundtvigian congregation built Immanuel church, while the older United Church tradition is reflected at Bethany, built in 1898. The two stand at opposite ends of town.
When is Tivoli Fest and what happens there?
Tivoli Fest is held every Memorial Day weekend in the Danish Villages of Elk Horn and Kimballton. It features Danish foods such as æbleskiver and medisterpølse, folk dancing, music, Viking battle demonstrations and tours of the Danish Windmill and the Museum of Danish America.
What is the Danish Windmill in Elk Horn?
It is a sixty-foot working mill built in Nørre Snede, Denmark, in 1848, then dismantled and shipped to Elk Horn, where community volunteers rebuilt it in 1976. Three miles from Kimballton, it is the best-known landmark of the Danish Villages and a tribute to the area’s heritage.
How large is Kimballton today?
Kimballton is a small town in Audubon County with a 2020 census population of 291, drifting toward 274 in recent estimates. Despite its size, the Danes in Kimballton sustain an outsized cultural life through Tivoli Fest, the Little Mermaid garden and several buildings on the National Register of Historic Places.
If your family’s story passed through Kimballton, or any of the places Danes have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a farmstead in Jutland to a mermaid on a rock in the Iowa prairie, to wherever you are now.