Swede Town: Swedish Immigration and the Furniture Empire

Walk through the neighborhood north of downtown Rockford in the eighteen eighties and you would have heard Swedish spoken on every block. By then the district known as Swede Town covered seventy city blocks. Swedish immigrants had been arriving since the eighteen fifties, drawn first by the farmland and then by the work, and by the middle of the nineteenth century they had built something that would define this city for the next hundred years.

They built the furniture industry.

It did not start that way. The first Swedish immigrants arrived with agricultural skills. But they also came with cabinetry skills, with the woodworking traditions of Småland and Dalarna, and Rockford had something those provinces did not: the Rock River for power and transport, vast stands of hardwood in the surrounding forests, and railroads arriving to carry finished goods to Chicago and beyond.

In eighteen seventy-six, a Swedish immigrant named John Erlander organized the Rockford Union Furniture Company, the first of what became twenty-five area furniture factories, most of them organized as worker cooperatives. That was the distinctive feature of Rockford's industry. The men who made the furniture owned shares in the companies. The Swedish cooperative tradition, transplanted to northern Illinois, produced an industry structure that concentrated skill and sustained quality.

By the first decades of the twentieth century, Rockford was the second largest furniture-manufacturing center in the United States. The Erlander home, built in eighteen seventy-one out of Rockford's first brick, still stands in the Haight Village neighborhood. It is now a museum maintained by the Swedish Historical Society of Rockford, and inside it the twelve rooms tell the story of that first immigrant generation who turned a river and a forest and a particular way of organizing labor into something that lasted a century.