The Heart of the Heartland

In the 1880s, the Norwegian immigrant community of the Twin Cities achieved an institutional completeness as well as a diversity and variety within the group that led to a great cultural flowering. All the classic dimensions of a dominant big-city immigrant community were present. Surpassing a threshold of size and population concentration allowed them to support two networks of Lutheran churches and their seminaries, as well as a Methodist and a Baptist congregation of Norwegians. These religious institutions in turn supported growing charity efforts for the less fortunate in the group and, increasingly, the public at large. Entrepreneurs grown successful by catering to the needs of a burgeoning local population developed several banks and financed small businesses that employed compatriots; the most common of these were boardinghouses or taverns. Census records document this expansion, and that first-generation women found economic niches in domestic service, housekeeping, dressmaking, and cleaning. Norwegian-born men earned livings in a variety of metal shop, woodworking, railroad, and construction trades. Churches, taverns, coffeehouses, meetinghouses, auditoriums, and cafés provided sites for leisure-time activities ranging from informal gatherings to lectures, choral concerts, theatricals, sports events, and club meetings—all conducted in one’s native tongue or dialect and the cultural forms to which one was accustomed. In these circumstances, three-quarters to four-fifths of the marriages that occurred were endogamous, between spouses who were both born in Norway.