Grandfather John Swanson
emigrates from Sweden
Posted 5/30/02

I grew up in Bock during the Depression years and was graduated from Milaca High School in 1941. My maternal grandparents owned a farm at the crossroad of County Roads 1 and 2 in Mille Lacs County. Several of my fatherís brothers and sisters also lived in the area. My siblings and I enjoyed close kinship with nature at relativesí farms and in nearby woods and along Bogus Brook near Bock. Since I retired from a career in health care, a move to land along Pine River provides a continuation of closeness with the outdoors that nourishes my affinity for planet Earth.

Much of my writing involves nature in some way. My work includes childrenís poetry and stories that often involve fantasy, and also adult poetry, fiction and essays. I am an active member of several local writers groups, each with its particular focus. I frequently attend a variety of writers conferences, workshops and courses.

In the distant past, I authored and co-authored several articles related to rehabilitation nursing. My poetry has been published in Dust and Fire 2000 and now again in their 2002 magazine. Last fall I wrote a feature article for the Pine River Journal on Riverscaping.

I hope you enjoy and can relate your families to the series Iíve written about my maternal grandparents, John and Mathilda Swanson.

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My motherís parents were Swedish immigrants. Her father and mother did not know each other when they lived in Sweden, rather they met on a muddy road east of Milaca in the spring of 1895.

One summer in the 1970s while recovering from surgery, Motherís sister, Alys Swanson Johnson penciled a notebook of recollections about the early lives and times of her parents and their six children. I typed and edited her handwritten words. Together Alys and I expanded on the material and added copies of pertinent documents plus many pages of photographs. The "Early History and Recollections of the John William and Gerda Mathilda Swanson Family" was completed in 1992, a three-year project. Material for this series of articles is gathered from my auntís writing and also from stories and memories of my own childhood and those of my three brothers. In addition, my brother-in-law Leonard West, who grew up in Bogus Brook Township, provided remembrances of life back then. Credits for most of the snapshots go to Annie, the eldest of the Swanson children, whose first extravagant purchase when she began teaching in country schools in 1915 was a Brownie box camera.

Aunt Alys writes her father, John William Swanson, at age sixteen, left Sweden for the United States in 1885. A friend, John Jackson, traveled with him. Grandpaís parents, Swen and Anna, and his brother Gust, three years older, arrived later that year. The family joined relatives who preceded them to the United States and were living near Pleasantville and Ossining, New York. Having arrived before 1892, the year Ellis Island opened, they came through other customs in New York City and were spared the well-documented indignity of this immigrant station that closed in 1954.

According to Alys, the men readily found employment in construction work. "Pa and his friend, John Jackson, worked on the Sing Sing Prison in Ossining.íí My grandfather was strong and physically fit. Endowed with unusually good balance and no fear of height, he worked with ease on the structures of tall buildings. This was a trait that became well known to the Swanson children and to us grandchildren.

My Uncle Charlie, Grandpaís oldest son, told me (sometime in the 1950s) of when he was young he watched his father work on the metal structure of a bridge being built (or possibly repaired) over the St. Croix River. Charlie laughed a bit as he told me this, partly in pleasure and partly in awe at Grandpaís daring. My brother Carl remembers Grandpa tripping across the roof of the barn on their farm and stretching over the peak of the roof without a qualm of fear to grease and repair the hay-lift pulleys. None of Grandpaís children or grandchildren inherited his agility.

Nor did Grandpa fear the underground. In 1887-88 for a short while, he and John Jackson worked on a tunnel being dug under the Hudson River to connect New York City with New Jersey. The men lived and worked on the New York City side.

In the history, Alys tells a story of the day when her father and John Jackson went to work in the tunnel and the weather was ordinary for a winter day. "When they came out of the tunnel to go home, there was a great snowstorm. The two started for home struggling in the snow. They came upon an abandoned milk wagon where they dug down, and, using the milk can covers for cups, they drank all the milk they wanted. Pa said, ëOh, but that was good."í Alys calculates this likely was the day of the great snowstorm in New York City on March 12, 1888.

Of her fatherís arrival to Mille Lacs County, Alys relates, "Pa read an advertisement in a New York paper of land for sale near Milaca, Minnesota." No doubt the ads were exaggerated in content and gloriously written. At any rate, Grandpa decided this was an opportunity for the family to acquire land of their own, an impossibility for crofter families when they lived in Sweden. Crofters are tenant farmers who work land owned by another person and pay the owner either in rent money or in shares of produce.

Alys writes of her father, "He came to Minnesota in 1888 at age 18 and purchased an undeveloped, ëwild,í eighty acres of land just east of Milaca from a lumber company." There was an agreement in which "the company was permitted to cut the timber within two years and, if uncut within that time, the trees would be left to the buyer."

An ample amount of accumulated snow was needed for horses to pull the huge sleds loaded with freshly cut logs. "The first year there was no snow and no trees were cut.... The second year there was snow and every tree was cut." I recall my grandfather telling us the company even took trees so small they would only make a lath.

Now the eighty acres, strewn with branches and peppered with tree stumps, was his to do with as he wished. Grandpa chose a place for a house and other buildings. He piled and burned branches and cleared the area of stumps. He burned the larger stumps, then dug around the smaller ones and arranged to have them pulled out by oxen. Alys says, when white pine stumps were burned, they burned for days.

Grandpa purchased several buildings (it is unknown how many) no longer used by a logging camp and had them moved onto his land. The largest building became his house, a smaller building was used as a shed for wood and tools and another good-sized building would be adapted for a barn for cows and oxenówhen he could afford to buy them.

Enlisting the aid of a friend, Grandpa dug a well, the first of at least three he would dig in his lifetime. Here also, as when working in the tunnel under the Hudson, he had no hesitation of digging the necessary depth to reach water. He added a circular stone foundation three feet high surrounding the well, then anchored an overhead frame and attached pulleys and ropes for raising pails of water and for lowering food to store in the cool well.

My grandfather was ready for his folks, Swen and Anna, and for his brother Gust to join him.