Gust Akerlund's Photograph of Small-Town Minnesota

The Cokato Museum in Wright County, Minnesota, preserves the studio of Gust Akerlund, a Swedish immigrant photographer who documented rural Minnesota life from the early nineteen hundreds through the middle of the twentieth century. Akerlund, a Swedish immigrant, set up his portrait and documentary studio in Cokato in nineteen oh two, a town built largely by Scandinavian immigrants. Over decades, he photographed farmers, families, churches, storefronts, and community events with careful attention, accumulating a visual archive that became one of the most thorough records of Swedish American immigrant culture in the Upper Midwest.

His glass plate negatives survived largely intact and were eventually recognized as a significant historical collection. The museum today holds thousands of his images alongside exhibits on Cokato's history and rural Wright County life from settlement through the mid-twentieth century.