Peering at the Past – Ben’s Mother Had Been Baptized

Part four of a series

Indians, in the 1850s, did not live around the village of Houston but were downstream toward the Mississippi, noted Ben Benson. “They often came up the Root River in their canoes on hunting trips.” As a senior citizen, Benson wrote about his childhood as one of the earliest white settlers in Swede Bottom. Although for completely different reasons, all Native Americans and those early Swedish immigrants were forced out of the land of their ancestors.

Ben’s written recollections have been the basis for the first three parts of this series, describing his family’s emigration voyage from Sweden and the first few years of their American experience. Now, this series reverts back to the beginning of Ben’s narrative – life in the old country in the early 1850s.

The Olaf Berntson (later Benson) family lived in Halland Province, Sweden, on a family farm, which was large for the time – about 160 acres along the shore of Vandelso Bay that opened onto the North Sea. Their large story-and-a-half frame house, where Ben was born, had eight rooms on high ground from which they could see the bay and ships as well as was the island of Vandelso, where Ben’s mother was born.

Ben’s father had an enclosed barn with a carpenter shop on one end and woodshed on the other with a driveway between the woodshed and the stables. Big loads of grain could be driven through the barn’s driveway doors to the granary inside.

They rented a few acres to a man, who for rent, kept the family stocked with fish – saltwater herring and mackerel. “They were good, I can tell you,” assured Ben.

“The regular farmers in Sweden lived better than they do here. They raised their own butter and cheese. They made a barrel full of beer from malt and hops, and it lasted two or three weeks … We baked bread once a month in big ovens, carrying twenty-five or thirty loaves at a time … We still had bread made at home in Sweden when we came to La Crosse, after our long time on the water (ocean).

“Each farmer along the coast ran his own sailboat up to Gothenburg. Each farmer had his own wharf, built with rock out to where the water was deep … We had a big boat, with which we took the farm produce, potatoes, oats and other things by water to Gothenburg where Englishmen would be with their vessels to buy it … On market days, the farmers took their stock to town to sell in the market place.

Each farm had an orchard with apple trees and pear trees. Ben recalled, “many kinds of berries growing on the stony pastures and along the stone fences … blueberries and blackberries as big as plums and sort of red berry like a cranberry only sweeter.”

After Ben’s detailed description of what sounded like an idyllic farm life in Sweden, one could ask why his family would abandon such a prosperous existence for the uncertainties of first a months-long, perilous ocean voyage and then the unpredictable rigors of travel halfway across the continent of North America. The Root River Valley had been highly recommended by a fellow Swede, but it was a wilderness, yet to be tamed. There was no going back. His father sold the family farm to finance the life-changing emigration.

About 200 years after Sweden’s failed colonization attempt at New Sweden (1638-1655) near the later site of Wilmington, Del., Swedish immigration to North America resumed during the 1840s. Like most European immigration at the time, it was mostly a response to economic woes. But that was not the situation on the flourishing farm of Ben’s birth.

Writing about the experience decades later, Ben barely addressed the reason they abandoned their former life and then only indirectly. If his target audience in the 1920s was his neighbors and family in and around Swede Bottom in Houston County, Ben may have felt they already well understood the situation in 1850s Sweden. But now, another century later, most current readers are unfamiliar with the significance when Ben wrote, “My mother, Christine, was baptized about 1851, and this was the reason we were part of the company that came over here in 1853, even though father was not baptized until we reached this country.”

Adult baptism by immersion, as described in the New Testament, was the definitive tenant of the Baptist movement that eventually reached Sweden, where the first few baptisms occurred in 1848 in the same province of Ben’s birth. Being a Baptist was considered a threat to both civil authorities as well as the established (Lutheran) Church of Sweden, which required infant baptism. A 1726 statute had outlawed religious meetings beyond the members of one’s immediate family at which state church ministers did not officiate.

The third prong of persecution involved their neighbors, who destroyed property and even stoned Baptists. Elderly Katrina Broberg, returning from a meeting in a small cottage, was assaulted by many thrown stones and left for dead. She survived, but thenceforth, her body evidenced the attack.

About Christmas 1848, just a couple of months after those first few September baptisms, the Baptists were attending a meeting inside a cottage when assailed by a mob, which first shouted threats before hurling rocks through the windows. The mob destroyed the doors while rushing in to demolish everything they could. The worshipers hid in an attic until the mob dispersed.

Infants, not yet sprinkled, were taken from their homes to the church for christening. Extra “transportation” fees were charged for this service.

Thus, the few Swedish Baptists who immigrated to Houston County in 1853 were among the more numerous and more well-known groups who sought religious freedom in North America in the 1600s: Puritan Separatists (Thanksgiving Pilgrims), English Catholics, multi-national Quakers and Jews plus the Protestant French Huguenots.

Forthcoming physical, legal and ecclesiastic action against their leader would render him the most famous person to live and die in Houston County, Minn.

To be continued …

Sources: Pioneering with God’s Promises, published by Minnesota Baptist Conference, 1958; A Pioneer Trio, by L. O. Backlund, 1942; A Centenary History as Related to the Baptist General Conference of America, by Adolph Olson, 1952; “Ben Benson: An Immigrant’s Story,” Houston County News, 1974