Solvang: The Danish Colony That Became a Theme Park of Itself

Three Danish-American educators, Jens Gregersen, Benedict Nordentoft, and Peder Hornsyld, purchased nine thousand acres of the Santa Ynez Valley in January of nineteen eleven. They had been living in the American Midwest and were looking for a place to build something specific: a Danish-language school, a Lutheran church, and a community where Danish immigrants and their children could preserve the culture and language they were watching dissolve into the American mainstream.

A school opened that same year. A college followed in nineteen fourteen. A church in nineteen twenty-eight. For several decades Solvang was a functioning ethnic colony, distinct from the surrounding California landscape in its language, its religion, its architecture, and its social life.

Then the postwar tourism economy arrived, and the community faced a choice that ethnic enclaves throughout American history have faced: become a destination, or remain a community. Solvang chose both, though not in equal measure. The windmill architecture that defines the town today, the Hans Christian Andersen Museum, the aebleskiver shops, the Viking imagery, the claim to the title of Danish Capital of America, these date largely to the postwar decades, when Solvang's leaders deliberately built a tourist identity around the Danish foundation.

Whether that constitutes authentic cultural preservation or themed commerce is a question Solvang itself has been arguing about for sixty years. The answer is probably that both are present and the line between them has always been movable. The nineteen eleven settlement was genuine. The founders were serious people with a serious purpose. The windmills were added for visitors.

What is not in dispute is the landscape they chose. The Santa Ynez Valley in winter looks nothing like Denmark and something like it anyway: flat valley floor, surrounding hills, cool fog in the mornings. The educators who bought this land knew what they were doing.