At 3:30 PM on Tuesday, July 22, Livsreise welcomed back Ramus Sunde, Ph.D. He is an expert on Norwegian emigration and author of several books on the subject.
Tuesday, July 29, 2025
At 3:30 PM on Tuesday, July 22, Livsreise welcomed back Ramus Sunde, Ph.D. He is an expert on Norwegian emigration and author of several books on the subject. He titled his presentation “The 200th Anniversary of Norwegian Immigration 2025. ” The focus of his talk was on what factors caused the group of fifty-two Quakers living on the west coast of Norway to leave for America aboard the sloop Restauration. He also detailed many challenges during the ocean crossing in this small, one-masted sloop. Once in America they traveled to a pre-arranged place for their new settlement in Kendall, NY. This land had been purchased by the American Quakers, and they had chosen Cleng Peerson, a sort of explorer and pioneer for the group to find a suitable spot. After four years of struggling to clear the land in this heavily forested area and with little success with growing crops, they decided to move west to Illinois where Cleng had found land better suited for farming, and homesteading. To this day Cleng Peerson is considered the “father” of Norwegian immigration and the settlement in Lasalle County, Illinois became, known as the “Fox River Settlement.” These first families became known simply as the “Sloopers” because they crossed the ocean in a sloop. Finally with the help of diagrams, Rasmus showed how and why emigration occurred in waves up until about 1930.
Category: Miscellaneous