Religious History of Immigration of 1862-1924

In 1850, most people in Minnesota were Dakota, Ojibwe, or of mixed heritage. By 1860, the majority were European or Euro-American settlers. Minnesota was granted statehood in 1858, and lands that were made available through the treaties of the 1850s, promoted by railroad companies, land speculators, and targeted emigration and colony-forming projects, attracted numerous new immigrants. Between 1965 and 1900, the state’s population grew seven-fold, from 250,000 to 1,700,000. Much of this growth was in ethnic enclaves that represented the

Some immigrants, especially the Irish and Jewish populations, were concentrated in St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Duluth, which were rapidly growing in the 1880s, but the majority of new immigrant settlement was rural, and the ethnic and religious diversity consequently was dispersed throughout the state, an artifact of promotional and colony-forming schemes and the frequent desire and need for settler peoples to make their own place. This history is of course there in the settlers’ place names: New Ulm, New Prague, Mora, Finland, Scandia, Heidelberg, Clontarf. Minnesota’s immigrant settlers created a diverse regional patchwork: Finnish people in Northeastern Minnesota, Swedes in the St. Croix River Valley, Norwegians in Goodhue and neighboring counties in the Southeast, and also western and northwestern parts of the state, Danes in Steele and Freeborn counties to the south. Considerable diversity within Christianity. By 1880, one-third of the state’s total population of 780,000 was foreign-born: roughly 67,000 Germans, 63,000 Norwegians, 39,000 Swedes, 26,000 Irish, almost all of whom were Protestant or Catholic Christians, and smaller populations of Czech, Slovak, Danish, Bohemian, Swiss, and Polish Christians, and a small cluster of German-born Jews.¹

Much of the story of Minnesota immigration is secular: the state formed a Board of Immigration in 1867, and the private railroads, interested in a return on their investment of infrastructure and land speculation, took pains to promote immigration to Minnesota in targeted European communities.² But there is also a religious history to Minnesota’s nineteenth-century immigration, and Minnesotans still live with the implications, especially the state’s political and cultural geography.

Germans, especially Catholic Germans, settled in considerable numbers in places like New Ulm on the Minnesota River. But they especially found their way to central Minnesota around St. Cloud, and this has deeply shaped the region’s culture and politics. Religious leaders set the table for these developments, helping shape the region and state’s culture. Francis (Franz) Xavier Pierz, a Slovenian priest whose original work in territorial Minnesota had been the mission to the Ojibwe, turned his attention to promoting German immigration, not because he was a land speculator or a railroad company, but to deepen Catholic Christian presence in the region. It was Pierz who, in 1855, persuaded five German Benedictine monks from Pennsylvania to found a community in St Cloud, eventually to become St John’s Abbey, and four Benedictine nuns soon thereafter to found St. Benedict’s Monastery, which eventually moved to St. Joseph. These two monastic communities, and the colleges they founded, became regional anchor institutions for German Americans and other Minnesota Catholics. But they also became global religious centers, flagship institutions that helped sustain Benedictine communities ravaged by European wars and richly involved with the liturgical reforms that led to Vatican II. He became the namesake of the town Pierz in Morrison County, whose lofty St. Joseph’s church on Main Street vies only with the water tower for prominence.

            The state’s early Irish population was, too, in part a product of religious history. In the late 1870s, Bishop (later Archbishop of St. Paul) John Ireland sponsored “the largest and most successful Catholic colonization program ever undertaken in the United States.”³ Though Ireland had been involved with earlier smaller scale Minnesota emigration efforts, the Catholic Colonization Bureau of Minnesota, which he founded in 1876, engaged the church with railroad companies to attract Irish immigrants already living in crowded cites in the Northeast to come to preselected railroad lands in a number of rural towns. The effort placed 4000 Irish Americans on 400,000 acres in a number of rural towns in Western Minnesota.⁴

            The religious history of immigration was not always so overt; most immigration in Minnesota was not arranged or promoted by religious leaders but rather religious communities sprang up wherever immigrants settled. These religious communities were places of familiar languages, cadences, tastes and smells. Catholic liturgies were of course in Latin, but patron saints and the social life of parishes and affiliated schools were profoundly inflected with ethnic identities. Especially because Protestant services were always in vernacular languages, churches could continue Norwegian, or Swedish, or German liturgies, making Sunday mornings powerful moments of connection with countries of origin. In tiny Lengby Minnesota, a stop on the Northern Pacific Railroad where my grandmother Ella Kampstad was born in 1896 to Norwegian speaking parents, there were two Lutheran churches: the Norwegian church where she was baptized, and the Swedish church, almost identical from the outside but where the language of worship and hymnody was Swedish.