They called it Vesterheim. The Western Home. Not the town itself, but the whole proposition of it: a fold of limestone bluff and trout stream in northeastern Iowa where, by the late 1850s, if you walked up Water Street you would hear Sognemål and Telemark dialect long before you heard English.
The smell of rommegrot on a stove. A church bell carried over the Upper Iowa River. And one fact that still surprises people: nearly 40 percent of Winneshiek County descends from Norwegian immigrants, the highest rural concentration of Norwegian ancestry in the United States.
Decorah, The Place
Decorah sits in the Driftless Area of northeastern Iowa, the only stretch of the Upper Midwest that the last Ice Age’s glaciers missed. The result is hills, bluffs, cold-water springs, and limestone caves: a terrain that looks nothing like the flat corn country south of it, and a great deal like the valley districts of western Norway. The town is the county seat of Winneshiek County, population around 7,600, and the campus of Luther College climbs the hill on its eastern edge. Highway 9 cuts through the town centre; everything important is within a fifteen-minute walk.
How Decorah Became Norwegian
Before the Norwegians
The site was named for a Ho-Chunk leader, Waukon-Decorah, whose Winnebago people lived along the Upper Iowa River until the federal removals of the 1840s. The first Anglo-American settlement was a single trading family in 1849. Within months, the place was platted as a town, and in 1851 it became the county seat of newly organized Winneshiek County.
What was waiting was prairie at the top of the bluffs and timber along the streams. Land was cheap. A General Land Office opened in Decorah from 1855 to 1856, which meant that anyone with a homestead claim could finalise the paperwork right there in town. That detail mattered more than it sounds. Word of it travelled.
The Norwegians Arrive
The first Norwegian families came in June 1850. A party of around a dozen households, led by Erik Anderson-Rudi and the brothers Ole and Staale Torstenson Haugen, walked west from the older Norwegian settlements in Dane County, Wisconsin, looking for unclaimed farmland. They stopped on a high tableland southeast of present-day Decorah and called it Washington Prairie. It became the mother settlement for every Norwegian community in northeastern Iowa.
The pull was the land, but the catalyst was a young pastor. Ulrik Vilhelm Koren, a 27-year-old Norwegian theologian, accepted a call from the Washington Prairie congregation in 1853 and arrived with his wife Elisabeth on Christmas Eve of that year, in deep snow, after a journey that had taken them most of a year. He conducted the first Lutheran service in Decorah itself on 10 July 1854, in a log schoolhouse on the site where First Lutheran Church still stands.
From there the chain pulled. Letters home described soil deeper than anything in Sogn or Hardanger, winters cold but survivable, and church services in Norwegian within walking distance. In Norwegian, the place was already being called Vesterheim, the Western Home. By 1860, Norwegian families had spread across Pleasant, Glenwood, Springfield and Madison townships. Decorah itself was the market town they came into on Saturdays, in wagons, in their good clothes.
Decorah at Its Peak
Two institutions made Decorah the unofficial capital of Norwegian America. The first was Luther College, founded as a Norwegian Lutheran seminary in 1861 and moved to Decorah the following year, with Pastor Koren personally raising six thousand dollars and selecting the hillside site that the college still occupies. Classes were taught in Norwegian. The library held books shipped over from Christiania. For a generation of Norwegian-American boys it was the only path to professional life that did not require leaving the language behind.
The second was a newspaper. Brynild Anundsen, a printer from Skien, launched the Decorah-Posten in 1874 from a small shop on Water Street. Within twenty years it had thirty-five thousand subscribers across the United States, Canada and Norway, in a town of three thousand people. Norwegian farmers in Minnesota and the Dakotas waited each week for the Posten to arrive in the mailbox. It carried news from home, agricultural prices, serialised novels, and, after 1918, the comic strip Han Ola og han Per by Peter Julius Rosendahl, which is still studied as folk art.
In 1877 a Luther College professor named Knut Gjerset began collecting the objects that Norwegian immigrants had carried with them across the Atlantic: bridal crowns, ale bowls, rosemaled trunks, hardanger fiddles, a bunad from a particular valley a particular grandmother could no longer wear. He stored them in the college library. That collection became, over a century later, the Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum.
The Change
By 1920, Norwegian immigration to America was effectively over. The 1924 Immigration Act capped Norwegian arrivals at a few thousand a year, and Norway’s own economy was improving. The Norwegian Lutheran churches around Decorah began, in the 1920s, to switch from Norwegian-language services to English. Decorah-Posten kept going on the strength of its older subscribers, finally closing in 1972. The last people who had grown up speaking Norwegian as a first language died in the 1980s and 1990s.
What did not fade was the identity. In 1967 the Decorah Jaycees, prompted by a Luther College alumna named Helga Lund Algyer who had read about a Scandinavian festival in Oregon, organised a three-day downtown party called Nordic Fest. The committee expected a few thousand visitors. Thirty-seven thousand showed up. The festival has run every July since. In 1965 the Luther College collection was spun off as a standalone museum, and the institution we now know as Vesterheim moved into its present buildings on Water Street.
The story shifted, in other words, from immigration to preservation. From speaking Norwegian to teaching it. From living in the old country to remembering it on purpose.
The Landmarks of Norwegian Decorah
Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum, 502 West Water Street. The largest Norwegian-American museum in the world, and one of the most comprehensive ethnic-heritage collections in the country: more than 33,000 artefacts and a campus of 12 historic buildings, including immigrant homes, a stone mill, and a stave-church-style structure moved here piece by piece. Vesterheim’s Folk Art School, around the corner on the same street, runs year-round classes in rosemaling, woodcarving, knifemaking, bunad sewing and Hardanger embroidery, taught by master artisans flown in from Norway each summer.
Luther College, 700 College Drive. Founded 1861 by Pastor Koren and the Norwegian Synod, still a Lutheran liberal-arts college, still teaching Norwegian as a regular language major. The Nordic Studies programme and the Luther College Norwegian Archive hold the largest Norwegian-American manuscript collection in private hands. The annual Christmas at Luther concerts, performed in Norwegian and English, are broadcast nationally on public radio.
First Lutheran Church, 604 West Broadway. The descendant of the congregation Pastor Koren formed in 1854. The current limestone church was built in 1876 and is still in use. The first Norwegian Lutheran services in Decorah were held on this site in a log schoolhouse.
Washington Prairie Lutheran Church, rural Decorah. Often called the first Norwegian Lutheran church built west of the Mississippi River. This was where Koren served his first congregation, and where the Norwegian settlement of Winneshiek County effectively began. The 1873 stone building still stands on the prairie southeast of town.
Nordic Fest, downtown Decorah, late July. Three days, around 40,000 visitors. Lutefisk-eating contests, a parade of bunad-wearing schoolchildren, troll trails for kids, folk dance, fiddle players from Norway, a Viking encampment, and food stalls running krumkake, lefse, rommegrot and varme polse from morning to night. The first festival was held in 1967.
Mabe’s Pizza, 110 East Water Street. Not a Norwegian institution by founding, but a Decorah one: a downtown pizzeria opened in 1953 that has sold more than 120,000 pies a year for decades. It is the closest thing the town has to a town hall. After Nordic Fest, this is where everyone ends up.
Dunning’s Spring and the Trout Run Trail. The bluff country around Decorah is woven with cold-water springs and trout streams; Norwegian farmers chose this land precisely because the topography reminded them of Sogn and Hardanger. Dunning’s Spring, a 200-foot waterfall north of downtown, was the kind of landscape detail that made the homesickness manageable.
Where the Decorah Norwegians Came From
The Norwegians who settled in Winneshiek County did not come evenly from across Norway. They came disproportionately from the rural fjord and valley districts of the west and south: Sogn og Fjordane, Hordaland and the Bergen hinterland, Møre og Romsdal, Telemark, Numedal, Hardanger and Voss. These were precisely the regions where the inheritance system of odelsrett gave the whole family farm to the eldest son and left younger siblings with no land at all.
The Washington Prairie founders traced to Sigdal and the upper Hallingdal valley. Brynild Anundsen, who founded Decorah-Posten, came from Skien in Telemark. Pastor Koren was from Bergen. The bunader on display at Vesterheim are mostly from Hardanger, Telemark and Sogn: not because those were the only places people came from, but because those were the regions whose textile traditions the grandchildren most wanted to recover. Walk the Vesterheim galleries and you are essentially walking a map of nineteenth-century rural western Norway.
Decorah Today
According to the most recent census ancestry estimates, around a third of Decorah residents and close to 40 percent of Winneshiek County still identify Norwegian ancestry. That is, by a long distance, the highest rural concentration of Norwegian heritage in the country. The language has effectively faded out of daily life, but Luther College still graduates Norwegian majors every spring, and the Vesterheim Folk Art School runs at near-capacity year-round.
Walk downtown on any Saturday and the past is layered into the present rather than buried under it. A young couple eating krumkake outside Vesterheim. A Luther student rosemaling a wooden box in a Water Street window. The Whippy Dip ice cream shack open on College Drive from spring through the leaves coming down. Mabe’s full at six. A trout fisherman parking by Dunning’s Spring at dusk. None of it is a museum piece. It is just what people in Decorah do.
The town is also, increasingly, a destination. Nordic Fest draws around 40,000 visitors over three days every July, more than five times Decorah’s population. Vesterheim recently expanded with a new commons building. The Decorah Eagles nest camera, run by the Raptor Resource Project from a tree near the trout hatchery, has been one of the most-watched wildlife livestreams on the internet since 2011: a quiet way that the bluff country, the land the Norwegians chose, has reached back out to the world.
If your great-grandparents came from a valley in Sogn or Telemark and ended up on a farm somewhere west of the Mississippi, there is a strong chance the path ran through here.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Norwegians settle in Decorah?
Norwegian families began arriving in Winneshiek County in June 1850 because cheap farmland was available, a federal Land Office operated in Decorah from 1855 to 1856, and the bluff-and-stream landscape of the Driftless Area reminded them of the valley and fjord districts of western Norway. Once Pastor Vilhelm Koren established the first Norwegian Lutheran congregation in 1853 and Luther College opened in 1861, chain migration from Norway pulled tens of thousands more settlers to Decorah and the surrounding townships.
Is Decorah still Norwegian today?
Yes, in a heritage sense rather than a language sense. Around a third of Decorah’s roughly 7,600 residents and close to 40 percent of Winneshiek County still claim Norwegian ancestry, the highest rural concentration in the United States. Norwegian as a daily spoken language faded out by the late twentieth century, but Luther College still teaches it as a major, and Norwegian crafts and food traditions remain part of everyday life.
What are the most famous Norwegian landmarks in Decorah?
The Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum on Water Street is the largest Norwegian-American museum in the world, with more than 33,000 artefacts and 12 historic buildings. Luther College, founded by Norwegian immigrants in 1861, anchors the eastern edge of town, while First Lutheran Church (1854) and Washington Prairie Lutheran Church mark the original congregation sites. Nordic Fest, the three-day Norwegian heritage festival held downtown every July since 1967, is the year’s central event.
Where in Norway did the Decorah Norwegians come from?
The Decorah Norwegians came overwhelmingly from the rural valley and fjord districts of western and southern Norway: Sogn og Fjordane, Hordaland and the Bergen hinterland, Møre og Romsdal, Telemark, Numedal, Hardanger and Voss. These were regions where the odelsrett inheritance system left younger sons landless, and where the bluff-and-stream terrain of northeastern Iowa felt closest to home.
When did Norwegians first arrive in Decorah?
The first Norwegian families arrived in Winneshiek County in June 1850, a year after Decorah itself was platted. They were led by Erik Anderson-Rudi and the Haugen brothers, who walked west from the older Norwegian settlement in Dane County, Wisconsin, and founded Washington Prairie just southeast of Decorah. Norwegian settlement of the surrounding townships grew steadily through the 1850s and 1860s.
If your family’s story passed through Decorah, or any of the places the Norwegians made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a valley farm in Sogn or Telemark, to a Lutheran church on a Winneshiek County prairie, to wherever in the world you live now.