Barit’s mother’s loom

Randi’s spinning wheel and Ole’s thread box.

Clay County Histories 

Markus Krueger | Program Director HCSCC

This 4th of July marked the 200th anniversary of the day a ship called the Restauration left Stavanger, Norway, on her way to New York City. This was the first boatload of Norwegian immigrants to come to America. Visit Fargo Moorhead and Iceland Air sent Moorhead musician Gus Holley to play Hardanger fiddle at Norway’s bicentennial celebration. Here at home, the Fargo Spelemannslag, our local Hardanger fiddle group, will celebrate the bicentennial of the day that ship arrived with a concert at Concordia College on October 9.
As part of the Norwegian American Bicentennial, our historical society just finished a new exhibit called Treasures from Norway, featuring artifacts from our collection that Norwegian immigrants brought to Clay County.
Among those artifacts are several of what we Americans call “Immigrant Trunks” but our Norwegian ancestors called their “Amerika Trunks.” These wooden boxes range in size, but are typically about three feet wide, two feet deep, and two or three feet tall. They are big enough that you’d want a second person to help carry it, but when you consider they contained everything a family had to start their new life in another country, they’re tiny. Today we rent U-Hauls to move across town.
Almost everything on display in the Treasures from Norway exhibit came to America inside one of these trunks. That means each item was carefully chosen. What kind of things did people bring?
Randi Petersdatter Holmen, like many women, brought her spinning wheel when she and her husband Iver left Norway bound for Ulen in 1884. This was a woman’s prized possession, skillfully made to turn wool into thread, a combination of useful tool and fiber art machine. I can almost hear echoes of a tense conversation 141 years ago… “You gonna bring that whole thing, Randi?” “It comes apart, Iver! It’ll fit!”
Ole Bergerson brought his shoemaking thread box. Like many items that found space in an Amerika Trunk, Ole’s box was homemade in a traditional Norwegian style, a useful object perhaps doubling as a reminder of home. It was lovingly incised with round “rosettes,” a six-point star or flower pattern that will be familiar to any lover of Scandinavian design or Scandinavian cookies. It is a “tine” box (pronounced TEE-nuh), one of those oval-shaped boxes made of a thin piece of wood bent around and stitched to itself. Certainly Ole knew he could get thread boxes in Minnesota, but probably not like this one. He brought it along.
A green and red hand-held loom might catch your eye. A loom like this was used for weaving different colored thread into patterns to make decorative bands for things like clothing fringe or belts. This loom belonged to Maret Pedersdatter Roragen and bears the date 1828. It was already old when it came here. We are not sure if Maret ever left Norway, but her daughter Berit Hitterdal (sometimes spelled Berith Hitterdahl) came to America with her family in 1869. This loom was passed down through her family line until her grandson Clifford Hitterdal donated it to the museum. I can imagine Berit packing her family trunk, carefully considering every object she, her husband, and her children had accumulated in their lives. She sorts it all into two categories: what can we bring, and what must be left behind. This loom is pretty, useful, and it belonged to mother. There is room for mother’s loom.
What would you put in your trunk? What would you bring to remind you of home? What do you need for the rest of your life?