REVIEW.
A few weeks ago I made a short visit to Vasa, our first home in Minnesota. The occasion was the eighty-seventh birthday of my mother, who still lives near the old homestead.[7] With spirited horses I drove in company with a son and a grandson over the same road which was first marked out by our simple ox wagon thirty-eight years before.
What a change! The former wilderness changed into smiling fields dressed in the purest green of early summer, and along the whole road are fine homes, nearly all of which belong to Swedish-Americans, who commenced their career as poor immigrants like myself, or to their children, most of whom are to the manor-born.
We stop twelve miles from Red Wing close to our old farm, at a little cottage surrounded by tall trees. There, by the window, sits greatgrandma, watching eagerly for someone whom she knows always spends that day with her.
Close to the quiet home stands the large Lutheran church, one of the finest country churches in America, and to the peaceful cemetery surrounding it we all soon make a pilgrimage to scatter flowers on the graves where my good father and sister, my wife’s parents, sister, and many other near relatives have found a resting place. The little cemetery is clothed in a flowery carpet of nature’s own garb, and studded with several hundred marble monuments with inscriptions that testify to the Swedish ancestry of those who rest under them.
SWEDISH CHURCH IN VASA.
From this place, which is the most elevated point in Vasa, the surrounding country affords a picture of such rural peace and beauty, that even a stranger must involuntarily pause to wonder and admire; how much more, then, I, who was the first white man that trod this ground! Below, toward the south, we see the wooded valley, watered by a little creek from Willard’s spring, where we came near perishing that cold January night in 1854; at the head of the valley, the hill where we built the first log cabin; immediately beyond this hill the hospitable home of my wife’s parents, from which I brought my young bride to our own happy little home, which stood on another hill near the same spring, and of which a part still remains; here, just below the church, is the field I first plowed; over there in the grove where we cut logs and fencing material, stands now the orphan home, established by Rev. E. Norelius; and on the other side the road is his handsome residence and garden, but he himself sits inside, frail and suffering on account of the hardships of the first few years.
Close by are the post-office, two stores, a blacksmith shop, a school-house, two smaller churches, one Methodist and one Baptist, and several other public and private buildings, and a few miles farther north, near the Cannon river, are two railroads, running from the Mississippi westward, connecting with other roads which span the continent, and only terminate on the shores of the Pacific ocean.
All around, so far as the eye can see, are green fields, grazing herds of cattle, planted and natural groves, comfortable buildings, and great white-painted school-houses. Not a hill, not a valley or a grove but they call forth touching recollections, some mingled with sorrow and pain, but by far the most bright and cheerful; for here I spent the first hopeful years of my manhood; here we lived, the first Swedes in Minnesota, in a circle of innocent and faithful friends; here I won the wife who tenderly and faithfully has shared the vicissitudes of life with me, in sorrow and in joy ever the same; here those of my countrymen who followed me when I was yet but a youth, have acquired independence, happiness, and such esteem that the settlement of Vasa has a reputation among the communities of the state which reflects honor upon the memory of the great king whose name it bears.