Norskedalen — The Norwegian Valley

Norskedalen, which means simply the Norwegian Valley, is a four-hundred-forty-acre nature and heritage center in the Coon Valley of southwestern Wisconsin that preserves the world the Norwegian immigrants built when they came here in the eighteen fifties and sixties to farm the coulee country of the Driftless Area.

The center began in nineteen seventy-seven when Alf and Carroll Gundersen donated one hundred twelve acres to the University of Wisconsin La Crosse Foundation as an outdoor laboratory and arboretum. It has since grown to include nine miles of trails, restored pioneer log buildings brought from the original Norwegian farmsteads, and museums that tell the immigrant story, the objects they carried from Norway, the techniques they used to build homes in a landscape that looked nothing like Scandinavia, and the communities they assembled in isolation that are now largely dissolved into the broader American Midwest. It is a careful act of preservation against the ordinary forgetting that erases every immigrant generation eventually.