The first weekend of August, on a low rise of the Pembina Plateau in northeastern North Dakota, a tiny prairie village raises the blue and white cross of Iceland. The wind comes in clean off the wheat. A pavilion fills with grandchildren and great-grandchildren of homesteaders, eating vinarterta and káfi, listening to a poem in a language most of them no longer speak. They call it the Deuce of August. It has happened, almost without break, since 1899. That makes Mountain, North Dakota, population around eighty, the home of the oldest continuously held Icelandic celebration in North America.
The Place
Mountain sits on a low ridge in the western edge of Pembina County, near the Cavalier County line, in the far northeastern corner of North Dakota. The land here is the Pembina Escarpment, a quiet shoulder of higher ground that rises out of the Red River Valley toward the Manitoba border, twenty miles to the north.
The town is small. A grain elevator, a few streets of frame houses, a Lutheran church, a cemetery, a community hall. Around it spread the old Icelandic townships of Akra, Gardar, Thingvalla, and Hallson, names a settler from Réttarholt or Hofsstadir would have understood without translation.
How It Became Icelandic
Before the Settlers
The Pembina Plateau was Dakota and Métis country before the homesteaders arrived. Bison ran through these grasslands, and the Red River carts ran the long trail south from Fort Garry to St. Paul. Treaty cessions in the 1860s and 1870s opened the land to American homestead claims, and the 1862 Homestead Act made 160 acres available to anyone who could break the sod and stay five years.
Norwegians and Swedes were arriving in numbers across the Dakota Territory in the same decade. The Icelanders who came to Pembina County would settle alongside them, but they kept their own townships, their own pastor, and their own language.
The Askja Eruption and the First Wave
On 29 March 1875, the volcano Askja erupted in the central highlands of Iceland. Ash fell over the eastern districts, especially North Múlasýsla, smothering pasture and poisoning water. The eruption did not kill directly, but it cracked an already brittle economy. Iceland in the 1870s was poor, crowded for the land it could farm, and battered by a run of hard winters.
Mass emigration began the next year. Between 1870 and 1914, roughly twenty thousand Icelanders left the island for North America. That was something close to a quarter of the entire population of Iceland. North Múlasýsla, which had taken the worst of the Askja fallout, sent the largest single share in the first big year, 1876.
The Gimli Route
Most of those early emigrants did not aim for Dakota. They aimed for New Iceland, a reserve set aside on the western shore of Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba in 1875. The settlement at Gimli, founded that autumn, was meant to be a self-governing Icelandic colony in Canada. It survived, just, through a smallpox epidemic, floods, and a brutal first winter.
But the land at Gimli was hard. Some of the New Iceland colonists began to look south. In March 1878, Rev. Páll Þorláksson, a young Lutheran pastor educated at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, led a party of twenty Icelanders from Gimli down into Dakota Territory in search of better land. They found it on the Pembina Plateau.
The Settlement of Pembina County
That December, Páll Þorláksson preached the first Icelandic sermon in the new settlement at the home of Butler Olson. Within a year, around fifty Icelandic families had moved down from Gimli to the high ground east of the Tongue River. They took up homesteads on the Icelandic townships and built sod houses, then frame houses, then churches.
Mountain was platted on Þorláksson’s own homestead. The post office opened in 1881, and the village kept the English translation of Víkur, the original Icelandic name for the rise. By 1890, the northeastern corner of North Dakota held the largest Icelandic population in the United States.
The Change
The Icelandic farms held for two generations. Then the same forces that hollowed out a thousand other prairie villages began to work on Mountain: mechanised farming, consolidation of land, the long drift of young people to Grand Forks, Fargo, the Twin Cities, the West Coast. The 1930s drought and the war years pulled more away. The Icelandic-language services at Vikur ended in the mid twentieth century. The community did not disappear. It thinned, and it spread out.
The Landmarks
Vikur Lutheran Church, Mountain. Built in 1884 on land donated by Rev. Páll Þorláksson before his death from tuberculosis in 1882, Vikur is the oldest Icelandic Lutheran church standing in North America. The oak-beamed nave measures 46 by 28 feet, with a centred bell tower rising to an octagonal spire. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2013, and the congregation still gathers there.
Vidalin Icelandic Lutheran Church, Akra. The pioneer congregation of central Pembina County, founded in 1886 by Rev. F. J. Bergmann in the heart of Akra Township. There is no active congregation today, but the building and cemetery are kept by the Vidalin Icelandic Lutheran Church Cemetery Association, and three services a year still happen inside it.
Icelandic State Park, six miles west of Cavalier. Established in 1964 on 200 acres donated by G. B. Gunlogson, a son of the settlement, the park sits on the north shore of Lake Renwick in Akra Township. It now stretches over 900 acres, with the Pioneer Heritage Center as its core. Inside the park are restored buildings moved here from the original Icelandic settlements, including Akra Community Hall and Hallson Church.
The Íslendingadagurinn Pavilion, Mountain. The pavilion in Mountain is the home of the annual Deuce of August festival, held the first weekend of August every year since 1899. In 1999, on the centenary, President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson of Iceland came to Mountain. He was the first sitting Icelandic president to visit North Dakota.
Mountain Town Hall and the village itself. The grain elevator, the streets named for early settlers, the houses built from prairie lumber. The village is small. It is also, on the first weekend of August, the unmistakable centre of Icelandic America.
Gardar Cemetery, Gardar Township. One of the older Icelandic burial grounds in Pembina County. The headstones carry surnames the homesteaders brought from Iceland: Thorlakson, Bergmann, Jonsson, Stephansson, Gislason, Gunlogson. Many were carved with patronymics first, then Anglicised by census takers.
Where They Came From
The Icelanders who built Mountain came mostly from the north and east of Iceland. North Múlasýsla, the district worst hit by the 1875 Askja eruption, sent a disproportionate share of the first wave. Other settlers came from Eyjafjörður, Skagafjörður, and the south coast.
Almost all of them came through Gimli first. The chain ran east to west: Iceland to a Scottish port, on to Quebec or Halifax, by rail and steamboat to Winnipeg, north to New Iceland, then south again across the border to Pembina. Stephan G. Stephansson, later celebrated as one of the most important Icelandic poets of his century, was one of the homesteaders at Gardar in 1880. He left for Alberta in 1889. Many followed.
Mountain Today
The village had a population of around eighty at the last count. Pembina County as a whole is around 6,800. The Icelandic share of the county is a fraction of what it was in 1890, but the surnames are still on the mailboxes, and the cemeteries still read like a register of Reykjavík parishes.
Vikur Lutheran is still standing. The Pioneer Heritage Center is open. And every year, on the first weekend of August, the descendants come back. Some drive in from Grand Forks or Fargo, two hours south. Some fly in from Minneapolis, from Seattle, from Calgary, from Reykjavík. They eat vinarterta, the layered prune cake their great-grandmothers brought from the north of Iceland. They hear the same hymns sung in the same church. They take photographs at the cemetery.
The community did not stay concentrated. It dispersed across North America. But it did not forget where it came from, and once a year, on a rise of prairie that the first homesteaders called Víkur, it gathers itself back together for a weekend.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Icelanders settle in Mountain, North Dakota?
Icelandic settlers came to the Pembina Plateau from the New Iceland colony in Gimli, Manitoba, beginning in 1878, looking for better farmland than the difficult ground around Lake Winnipeg. Rev. Páll Þorláksson led the first party south, and Mountain was platted on his own homestead.
Is Mountain, North Dakota still Icelandic today?
The village has a population of around eighty, and Icelandic ancestry remains the most visible heritage there, even though most descendants have moved to Grand Forks, Fargo, the Twin Cities, and beyond. Vikur Lutheran Church still stands, and the annual Íslendingadagurinn festival continues every August.
What are the most famous Icelandic landmarks in Mountain, North Dakota?
Vikur Lutheran Church, built in 1884 and the oldest Icelandic Lutheran church in North America, is the central landmark. Icelandic State Park near Cavalier preserves the Pioneer Heritage Center and restored settlement buildings, and the Íslendingadagurinn pavilion in Mountain hosts the annual festival.
Where in Iceland did the Mountain settlers come from?
Most of the first wave came from the north and east of Iceland, especially North Múlasýsla, which was hardest hit by the 1875 Askja eruption. Others came from Eyjafjörður and Skagafjörður in the north. Almost all of them passed through Gimli, Manitoba, before moving south.
When did Icelanders first arrive in Mountain, North Dakota?
The first Icelandic settlers arrived in the spring of 1878, led by Rev. Páll Þorláksson from Gimli. By 1879 around fifty families had moved down from New Iceland, and within a decade the northeastern corner of North Dakota held the largest Icelandic population in the United States.
What is Íslendingadagurinn in Mountain, North Dakota?
Íslendingadagurinn, also known as the Deuce of August, is an Icelandic heritage festival held on the first weekend of August every year. It has been celebrated in Mountain since 1899, making it the oldest continuously held Icelandic celebration in North America.
If your family’s story passed through Mountain, North Dakota, or any of the places the Icelanders made home, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the lava fields of North Múlasýsla, through Gimli on the lake, to the Pembina Plateau, to wherever you are now.