Little Norway: A Norwegian Farm in the Wisconsin Hills

In the eighteen fifties, a man named Osten Olson Haugen left the Telemark region of Norway and settled on forty acres of hilly ground outside Blue Mounds, Wisconsin. He built in the Norwegian style he knew, with log construction and a farmstead layout that recalled the valley farms of Telemark. It was, in miniature, a piece of the old country transplanted to the American Driftless hills.

In the early nineteen thirties, a Chicago businessman named Isak Dahle, who had grown up nearby and recently returned from a trip to Norway, purchased the old Haugen farm and set about restoring and expanding it as a gift for his family. He called it Little Norway and filled it with Norwegian antiques, farm tools, and folk art. The goal was partly personal, a reconnection to his own heritage, and partly cultural, a living demonstration of the Norwegian immigrant experience in the American Midwest.

The crown jewel of the property was a stave church building originally constructed in the Norwegian town of Orkdal for the Norwegian Pavilion at Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition of eighteen ninety-three. Stave churches are among the most distinctive structures in Scandinavian architectural history, using a post-and-beam frame of vertical wooden staves, often with steeply pitched roofs and dragon-head carvings at the ridgelines, a style reaching back to medieval Norway. After the exposition, the building was purchased and eventually moved to the Blue Mounds site, where it became the most visited feature of Little Norway for decades.

For most of the twentieth century, Little Norway drew Norwegian-American visitors from across the upper Midwest, functioning as a kind of ethnic memory palace in the Wisconsin hills. It closed in late twenty twelve, and the stave church building was later bought by a delegation from Orkdal, taken down, and shipped back to Norway. The farmstead itself has been quiet since, but it marks a landscape shaped by Scandinavian immigration as thoroughly as any part of Wisconsin.