The name of Nels O. Cassem occupies a prominent place in the history of the settlement as of that of Kendall County in general. Born in 1829 about seven miles east of the city of Stavanger, Norway, he emigrated in 1849. Coming to Illinois he settled in Fox Township, Kendall County, in July of that year. Here he purchased land and began farming, an occupation which he prospered in to an unusual degree, his estate being estimated at a little over one million dollars upon his death in 1904.[401] “When he came to Illinois,” writes his son, “he found work on the tow-path of the old Illinois and Michigan Canal, at fifty cents per day. During this time he formed the habit of saving, that was the unerring guide of all his future life.” Randall Cassem defines the principal causes of his father’s success as:
“Health; industrious habits formed in youth; the fact that money came hard earned at first, thus teaching him the value of the dollar; courage and self-reliance; knowing the value of little things; the practice of self-denial and rigid economy; never striving after extravagant profits in any of his undertakings. To all of this we may add, his high sense of honor, his unimpeachable integrity that, as those who knew him testify, never permitted him to be other than absolutely fair and just in all his dealings and financial transactions with others.”[402]
Among those who immigrated in 1844 and located in Chicago was also Anders K. Vetti from Vettigjæld, Norway. He lived in Chicago until about 1849,[403] when he bought a farm at Yorkville Prairie in Kendall County. He married Anna Martha Ortzland in 1850 and lived there till his death in 1875. Mr. Vetti was a man of strong character and unusual intellectual endowments. He wielded much influence politically in his community, and enjoyed in a high degree the confidence of those who knew him. An obituary notice says of him: his truest and most enduring monument will be the good resulting from his labor in the cause of universal education, in untiring opposition to the superstitious observance of ceremonies incompatible with the spirit and the progress of the age, and in his hatred of all forms of political oppression.[404]
A few miles south of Lisbon, across the Grundy County line, a settlement was founded in 1846. The county had been completely settled by Americans already, but Norwegians bought these out and gradually supplanted them, exactly as they began doing a decade later at Saratoga in Grundy County, and have done still later in the city of Morris in the same county. The settlement is located in Nettle Creek Township. The first arrivals were Rasmus Scheldal, Ole Torstal, Paul Thompson, Michael Erickson, Simon Frye, John Wing, Lars Scheldal, Ben Hall, Ben Thornton, John Peterson, G. E. Grundstad, William and Samuel Hage. Several of these men had families; they came mostly from Skaanevik; all came between 1846 and 1848. In 1849 Halvord Rygh, Sr., and family of seven, and Sjur Nelson, wife, Jennie, and family, came from Norway and located there. Several of these men later moved away, as Paul Thompson, Michael Erickson, Rasmus Scheldal, and Ole Tvistal, who went to Story County, Iowa, while some members of the Rygh and Wing families went to Goodhue County, Minnesota, 1856. Sjur Haugen and family moved up to Helmar, Kendall County, in 1855.[405]
With this brief survey of the founding of these eastern extensions of the Fox River Settlement, we shall leave Kendall and Grundy Counties. The history of these settlements takes its beginnings at the very close of the period we are here considering. Their fuller discussion belongs to the history of the immigration of the following decade.[406]
CHAPTER XLI
The First Norwegian Pioneers in Northeastern Iowa
In this chapter I shall give a brief account of the coming of Norwegians into northeastern Iowa and their founding of settlements there between 1846 and 1851. We are near the close of the period which this volume deals with. The founding of settlements in Iowa in 1849–50 is but a part of a larger movement now beginning, which, in the course of a few years, resulted in the establishment of numerous settlements in Wisconsin, Iowa, and southeastern Minnesota.[407] These settlements were founded in general through internal migration away from the older settlements in Racine, Rock, and Dane Counties. The latter were now becoming overcrowded and they furnished hundreds upon hundreds of recruits to the new settlements that were fast springing up. It is with the years 1848–49 that we associate this new trend in the movement, and which inaugurates this new period in the whole movement. Only its beginnings will here briefly be sketched as related to the counties of northeastern Iowa. Of the mass of material which has been placed at my disposal, I can only select what appears most essential to the purpose.
The first county settled by Norwegians in northeastern Iowa was Clayton. The first settlers were Ole H. Valle and wife and Ole T. Kittelsland who located in Read Township in the summer of 1846. Both these men had, however, entered Iowa three years before. In 1843 they had come to the old Fort Atkinson in Winneshiek County, and had remained there for three years in the service of the government.[408] Valle and Kittelsland were both from Rollaug, Numedal; they had immigrated in 1841 to Rock Prairie, and had from 1841–1843 worked in the Dodgeville mines. In 1846 Sören O. Sörum from Land Parish, Norway, came to Fort Atkinson and in 1847 Ingeborg Nilsen, a cousin of Ole Valle, came there.