Stoughton's Main Street: Where Norway Came to Wisconsin
Near Madison, Wisconsin
The downtown you see along Main Street in Stoughton is one of the most intact collections of nineteenth-century commercial architecture in southern Wisconsin, and most of it was built by Norwegians.
Norwegian immigrants began settling this part of Dane County in the eighteen fifties, drawn by farmland that reminded them of home. They came in large enough numbers that by the turn of the twentieth century, Norwegian was widely spoken in Stoughton homes. The immigrants worked in agriculture and in factories, particularly at the T. G. Mandt Wagon Works, which became one of the region's major employers.
The thirty-six historic business structures that form the Stoughton Main Street Commercial Historic District were added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty-two. They represent the downtown that the Norwegian immigrant community built as it grew prosperous , a dense run of brick storefronts, built in waves through the late eighteen hundreds, that managed to survive while many comparable Midwestern downtowns were demolished or gutted in the twentieth century.
The Norwegian identity of the town never faded. Stoughton still holds an annual Syttende Mai festival , the seventeenth of May , celebrating Norwegian Constitution Day with parades, traditional dancing, and cultural events. The festival is one of the largest Syttende Mai celebrations outside of Norway itself.
In twenty fifteen a Norwegian Heritage Center called Livsreise opened on Main Street, offering interactive exhibits on the immigrant experience and the journey these families made from Scandinavia to the dairy country of south-central Wisconsin. The word Livsreise means life's journey in Norwegian , an apt name for a museum located in a downtown that Norwegian hands built a century and a half ago.
Stoughton's story on Route Fifty-One is a reminder that the Upper Midwest's Norwegian communities were not simply one wave among many , in towns like this one, they were the wave that shaped everything.
