Part five of a five-part series
The Swedes who settled the area still known as Swede Bottom, were the first and probably the only group of Swedish Baptists to leave their homeland solely for religious freedom. In 1853, they were led to North America by F. O. Nilsson, who in September 1848, had organized the first Baptist congregation, the first successful “free church” in Sweden. Fredrick Olaus Nilsson was arguably the most famous person to live, die and be buried in Houston County, Minnesota.
Nilsson was well-known in early Minnesota and Iowa but not as famous there as he was in Europe, subject of several biographies. One historian wrote, he “received international press attention, much of it brimming with criticism of the Swedish government.” For 125 years, it had been illegal in Sweden to conduct a religious meeting in any place other than the Lutheran Church of Sweden.
Baptists there were persecuted not only by state and church authorities but also by their neighbors. In 1850, Baptists, celebrating communion in a private home, were attacked when a mob broke in with “sticks, clubs, guns (and) knives” and then “kicked and struck” the worshippers before hauling Nilsson in an open cart in bitter winter cold to the district sheriff, who jailed him for seven days in a dungeon without a bed or heat, where he ran back and forth to keep from freezing to death.
Nilsson was tried and sentenced to banishment for preaching false dogma. In 1851, he applied unsuccessfully to King Oscar I. He and his wife went to Copenhagen, Denmark in exile.
During the next two years, his congregation in Sweden, despite unofficial harassment and official persecution, grew from five to more than 50, including 21 who decided to emigrate, a few specifically to the Root River Valley. They asked their exiled leader to guide their journey. He was ordained to perform sacraments and as a former sailor, had worked in the United States and spoke English.
Although Denmark officially had religious freedom, at least 80 Danish Baptists were along with Nilsson and the 21 Swedes when they departed Gothenburg, Sweden on the American ship Jenny Pitts May 5, 1853. After enduring seven weeks of hardship on the Atlantic, they were greeted in New York City by Anders Wiberg, a missionary who had been baptized in 1852 in Denmark by exiled Nilsson. Some of the believers disembarked penniless, but Wiberg arranged lodging and some financial help. Wiberg urged Nilsson’s immigrants to proceed first to the Swedish Baptist settlement at Rock Island, Ill.
Although Nilsson’s Swedish Baptists were the first to escape persecution in Sweden, there were already Swedish Lutherans in America, who due to frontier missionary efforts, had become Baptists after immigrating. The flock at Rock Island had been organized by Gustav Palmquist, a former Swedish Lutheran pastor to whom Nilsson had introduced Baptist teachings, but had not become a Baptist until coming to Illinois.
West of Chicago, the Danish believers headed north into Wisconsin. Nilsson’s Swedes, after travel by canal boat, sailing ship, railroad cattle car, ox cart and on foot, arrived in Rock Island, where the small Baptist congregation had been organized the previous summer.
From Chicago, heading southwest to Rock Island was not the most direct route to Minnesota. But a brief stopover among other Swedish-speaking immigrants provided a welcoming respite. And Rock Island was on the Mississippi River, the next avenue of their journey. Eight stayed there, including Nilsson for a while.
Six families continued by freight steamboat up the Mississippi to La Crosse, by ferry to La Crescent, by rented wagons and on foot for 20 miles to a settler’s cabin in Looney Valley and by oxcart to the Root River, where Houston consisted of only two dwellings. On August 18, 1853, three months, 12 days after leaving Sweden, they pitched their tents two miles east of a Native American village.
They prayed that day in gratitude, the first worship service in Houston County and first Baptist worship in Minnesota. Nine members of the first Baptist church in Sweden became the first Baptist congregation in Minnesota and the third Swedish Baptist church in the United States, preceded only by Rock Island (1852) and Village Creek, Iowa (eight days before Swede Bottom).
Missionary work near Rock Island occupied Nilsson the next few months before he made a short visit to Swede Bottom in November 1853, where he learned of their travails with illness, poverty and prairie fire burning the hay for winter oxen feed. Nilsson wrote to Wiberg, “What are they to live on since all their money is gone in a place where there is no opportunity of earning anything? I feel sorry for them. May the Lord have mercy and help them.”
Wiberg again raised money ($70) in New York for them. Cholera claimed five (nearly half of them) the next July (1854).
Worship occurred in members’ homes until the construction of a church in 1865. With few Baptist ministers and the means to pay them, layman farmers handled most early spiritual work. Besides a couple of brief resident pastorates, Nilsson was among itinerant preachers who visited Houston.
In 1860, Nilsson returned to Sweden where new king Carl XV ended his banishment, which had been bad publicity for Sweden. It then became legal for Swedes to leave the Church of Sweden for another Christian group. After Nilsson’s six years in America, there were 4,500 Baptists in Sweden.
At age 60, in 1869, he and wife Sophia returned, and for the first time, he became the resident minister in Houston. Strangely however, he adopted some extremely liberal theology, which split the congregation for several years. But four days before he died, Nilsson wrote to a friend about his renewed faith in God’s grace, closing with: “Jesus Christ is my only hope … May the Lord help me to the last.”
Following 25 years of failing health, asthma-ravaged Nilsson died in 1881, at age 72. Sophia died in 1903 at age 90. Both were buried in Swede Bottom Cemetery.
Sources: All the Way, by Fridolph Edward Nelson, 1995; “F. O. Nilsson and the Swedish Baptists,” by David Jessup, Pietisten, 2011, Vol. XXVI; Pioneering with God’s Promises, 1958; A Pioneer Trio, by L. O. Backlund, 1942; A Centenary History, by Adolph Olson, 1952; “Ben Benson: An Immigrant’s Story,” Houston County News, 1974; “Saga of the Swedes,” and “Tragedy Strikes,” Historical Notes of Interest, by Mason Witt, 1974; History of Houston County, 1822
Photo courtesy of Bethel University
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