News

A history of the Swedish Zion Lutheran Church

By Scott Wagar

06/25/2013

Editor’s Note: The Bottineau Courant is conducting a series on the history of the Swedish Zion Lutheran Church due to the church’s 110th Anniversary and structure being named to the National Register of Historic Places. This week, the Courant looks at the builders of the church.

Six years after the Swedish Zion Lutheran Church (SZLC) was established in 1896, the congregation of the Swedish Lutheran Church made the decision to construct their own church which would be made of stone.

The stone of choice was not chosen by the congregation, but by the land they chose to live on. When the Swedish immigrants migrated from Sweden they made their way to North Dakota to get free land through the Homesteaders Act, a program set up by the U.S. government which gave 160 acres (a quarter of land) to immigrants for little or no money.

The program had the name “Free Soil”, but that was an understatement considering the immigrants gave all their livelihood (and health) to live on the land. Those pioneers which were granted a homestead, they had to live on the land, build a home on it, farm it and make improvements for a minimum of five years. If they failed in any of these requirements they lost everything.

For those who migrated to Bottineau County, they had their work cut out for them. Once on the land, they realized the soil they would have to farm was full of rocks, granite stones to be precise, which is one of the heaviest and hardest stones known in the world.

The granite stones date back millions of years and were formed in the Hudson Bay area. The stones began their journey to the Turtle Mountains through moving glaciers some 10,000 years ago and ended their voyage in this area forming the Turtle Mountains; and, leaving granite stones spread throughout the county.

Gene Wunderlich, a retired member of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, who grew up in Bottineau County and attended the Swedish Lutheran Church, stated it best in his book, “Stone Church: A Prairie Parable,” what immigrants faced when they started to work the land.

“During the 1800s, the plow was transitioning from human to horse harness. Gang and skulky plows became common, enabling farmers to place two or four shares into the soil and greatly expand the area they could prepare for spring planting. In the early 19th century, Jethro Wood patented a plow with a changeable share and by the time of the Civil War, John Deere’s redesigned steel plow had largely replaced the cast iron plow. Refined and upgraded versions of the John Deere steel plow were common on the farms of the SZLC builders. It was on those tips of those plows that the Swedish farmers encountered the granite homesteaders of the ninth and tenth millennia era,” wrote Wunderlich. “Stone encounters were resolved in a variety of ways. Some with a grating noise as the plowshare passed beside or over the stone, some with a jar and lofting of a junior member of the stone community, and some with a jolting stop at a large, unyielding member of the stone community. The worse case was a broken share.”

To remove the stones, local landowners used a low lying skid with planks to roll the stones onto the skid, which was then pulled out of the fields. For the smaller stone, wagons were brought in and farmers would pick them up, put them in the wagons and off the crop land. For those just too big to handle, other sized stones would be moved to that area and stone piles were made.  

Simply put, these stones were backbreaking work for the homestead farmers.

The men who assisted in building the Swedish Church were immigrants from Sweden and Norway. They included: John O. Anderson, Oscar Anderson, Arvid Backman, Emanuel Backman, Godfrey Backman, Ole Backman, Peter Backman, Adolph Eklund, Olaf Eklund, Algot Forsberg, Carl G. Forsberg, Ernest Forsberg, Ben Gustafson, Herman Gustafson, John Gustafson, Roger Gustafson, Carl Hedeen, Frederik Johnson, Ole Krogh, John Lindstrom, August Lybeck, Carl Lybeck, W.B. Nelson, Jonas Norman, Carl Olson, Jacob Olson, Lars Olson, Ole Olson, Leander Perrson, John Peterson and John Schroeder.   
Wunderlich also states in his book that the majority of these men were farmers, busy working the land and keeping their heads above financial struggle.

However, along the way as land owners they learned carpenter skills, and a few of them, masonry skills.

Wunderlich added that the average age of the builders was 32 and that about half of the Swedish immigrants came from Värmland, Sweden. It is believed that the oldest man in the group was Olaf (Ole) Eklund at 66, while the youngest person was Roger Gustafson, age 9.

Being part of the build team was so important to Carl Gustav Forsberg he worked with a physical handicapped. In the book, “People of Bottineau County”, the Forsberg family wrote that at the age of 35 Forsberg injured his right arm and hand “in a runaway” (with a horse(s). The injury left him without the use of his right arm and hand, but he worked on the church project, no doubt with a deep endeavor for his church and the community he lived in.

Peter Backman was one of the primary men of the group who was in favor of a stone church. In the “People of Bottineau County” his family stated that Backman “wanted stone for the church because past experience convinced him that granite would outlast other building materials.” During the build, Backman split rock and helped build the church walls.

Leading the men were the stonemasons, which included Claus Lundquist, Thor Landsverk and his brother Gunder Landsverk. Through 1910 U.S. Census, Wunderlich discovered Lindquist was living in Souris at that time with wife and children. The census placed his age at 42, which means that during the time the stone church was being constructed Lundquist would have been in his 30s.

The census also listed him as a bricklayer. After 1910, Lindquist is no longer seen in the local census and little is known about what happened to him.

The Landsverk brothers are just as much a mystery as Lundquist. Wunderlich discovered that the family had migrated to America from Seljord, Norway. Wunderlich also came across a history book out of Wisconsin where a family member, Owen Landsverk, writes about Thor and Gunder and states that the brothers had worked as stonemasons on the church and had learned the trade from their father, Svennung, who taught his two boys well. Amazingly, at the start of the build in 1903, Thor was just 18 years old, while Gunder was only 14.        

For the Swedish immigrants that stayed on the land, they were hardy folks and they had the skills to create what they needed to live, improve their homesteads and the area around them, like a majestic stone church in the foothills of the Turtle Mountains.

In 1903, these Swedish and Norwegian men began building the stone church, and on their way, they would find an interesting journey working with the stone.  

Writer’s Note: Next week, the Bottineau Courant will continue the series of the Swedish Lutheran Church by looking at the construction of the church. Sources for this article included The Bottineau Courant, Gene Wunderlich’s “Stone Church: A Prairie Parable”and “The People of Bottineau County.”