Scandinavian Heritage Park: Five Countries on a Former Landfill
Near Minot, North Dakota
A few blocks from downtown Minot, North Dakota, fourteen acres of former city landfill have been transformed into believed to be the only park in the world representing all five Nordic nations. The Scandinavian Heritage Park was established in nineteen eighty-eight and grew out of local heritage clubs representing the region's dominant immigrant stock: roughly thirty-eight percent of North Dakotans claim Scandinavian ancestry today, a legacy of the Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, and Icelandic settlers who arrived on the Great Plains in the eighteen seventies. Visitors walk past a Norwegian log house more than two hundred years old, a traditional stave church, a Finnish sauna, a Danish windmill, and a thirty-foot Swedish Dala horse painted in traditional red.
Statues of Leif Eriksson and Hans Christian Andersen anchor the grounds. The first building was dedicated on October ninth, nineteen ninety. The stave church is a replica of one built in Gol, Norway, around twelve fifty, and the log house is from Sigdal, Norway.
The Hans Christian Andersen statue is joined by bronze statues of Sondre Norheim, called the father of modern skiing, and Casper Oimoen, a Norwegian immigrant ski jumper who settled in Minot. The park is a quiet but vivid record of the cultural transplant that shaped this corner of the country, where church basements still serve lutefisk at Christmas.
