Swedish and German Settlers Along the Burlington

In the eighteen seventies, a land agent for the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad set up an office in Sweden. His name has not survived well in the historical record, but his mission was clear: fill the empty miles of south-central Nebraska with paying settlers who would buy Burlington land and ship Burlington grain. The railroad had been given a land grant by the federal government, alternating sections stretching miles on either side of the tracks, and it needed to sell those sections to pay for the steel it had already laid.

The pitch in Sweden, and in the German states to the west, was simple: land for less than you would pay in Illinois, climate similar to northern Europe, soil as dark as anything you have farmed before. Ship passage could be arranged. Railroad passage from the East Coast could be arranged. The Burlington even translated its promotional pamphlets into Swedish and German.

It worked. Swedes came to the towns along the Platte and the Republican and the Blue rivers. They settled places like Stromsburg, Axtell, and Wahoo. German immigrants settled in similar numbers, filling in the small-farm prairie between the river towns. By eighteen eighty, Swedish-born residents made up a significant portion of the population in several south-central counties. Lutheran and Swedish Methodist churches went up on the same streets as German Lutheran and German Catholic congregations.

The settlement pattern left a linguistic and cultural overlay that lasted for generations. Church services in Swedish continued in some congregations into the nineteen thirties. The names on the county courthouse records tell the story without commentary: Lindquist, Bergstrom, Olson, Krause, Hoffman, Vogel. They came because a railroad wanted to sell land. They stayed because the land was good.