Bishop Hill: The Swedish Utopia

In eighteen forty-six, a Swedish religious reformer named Erik Jansson boarded a ship in Liverpool with four hundred followers and crossed the Atlantic to build a community from nothing on the Illinois prairie.

Jansson had been burning Lutheran Bibles in Sweden, convinced they were corrupt and that his own interpretation of scripture was the only valid one. The Church of Sweden and civil authorities had been pursuing him. He told his congregation that America offered the freedom to start over, to live communally, to be equal in work and worship. They believed him.

They named their Illinois settlement for Biskopskulla, the Swedish parish where Jansson was born. The first winter was devastating. Lacking adequate shelter and food, many colonists died. Those who survived began building in earnest in eighteen forty-seven, using the flat prairie landscape and local clay for brick construction. Permanent buildings rose. New immigrants arrived, and the population grew to roughly fifteen hundred people. Bishop Hill became a regional commercial center, producing furniture, wagons, fine linen, and farm products sold across the upper Midwest.

In eighteen fifty, Jansson was shot and killed in the courthouse in Cambridge, Illinois, by a man named John Root. Root had married Jansson's cousin. When Root decided to leave the colony, he wanted to take his wife and child with him. Jansson refused. Root killed him.

Without Jansson, the colony carried on under elected trustees for another decade. Economic mismanagement, bad investments, and internal disagreement unraveled the communal structure. In eighteen sixty-one, the property was divided among the settlers. The colony dissolved.

What survived is a village of extraordinary buildings. Colony-era brick structures still stand on a grid Jansson laid out on the prairie. A painter named Olof Krans, who had arrived as a child in eighteen fifty, spent his old age painting everything he could remember about the community. His canvases are what Bishop Hill looks like now in the mind's eye.