Jansson was born in the village of Landsberga in the parisih Biskopskulla in Uppland, near Uppsala, Sweden, the son of farmer Jan Mattsson and his wife Sarah Eriksdotter.
Believing that he was miraculously cured of rheumatism after experiencing a vision at age 22, Jansson became devoutly religious and began reading works of the German mystic Johann Arndt.
"[6] Jansson believed in the supremacy of the Bible and his own revelations and, beginning in 1844, publicly burned the works of Luther and others and urged his followers to do likewise.
Authorities arrested him, but Jansson was released several times after his followers appealed to Sweden's King, who felt imprisonment inappropriate for religious beliefs.
When Jansson voluntarily appeared at a court session at Delsbo in Gävleborg province to answer charges, he was returned to Gävle prison while investigations continued.
There he met a fellow Swede, Olof Gustaf Hedstrom, who suggested that Olsson contact his brother, Jonas Hedström, who was living in Victoria, Knox County, Illinois near the Mississippi River.
Residents began their daily worship after Jansson rang a bell around 5:00 a.m. and diligently studied English to proselytize their neighbors, as well as ground bushels of corn to boil for basic survival.
When a fifth group of more than four hundred immigrants from Sweden arrived in 1847, the commune's population reached 700, but the subsequent severe winter led to food shortages and illness and about 200 people left to join a nearby Methodist community, using personal wealth they had hidden in order to buy land.
Although nearly bankrupted by Dr. Foster and despite the desertions, the colony of 100 men, 250 women, and 200 children owned 4000 acres of land, a church, grist and flour mills, three dwelling houses, and five other buildings.
Root tried another kidnapping on March 26, 1850, this time recruiting some brother Masons from Cambridge as assistants, but they left Bishop Hill empty-handed because Jansson hid Lotta and the baby, and ultimately fled with them across the Mississippi River to St. Louis, where he took a job as a flour salesman.
[14] Illinois' legislature issued a charter to Bishop Hill on January 17, 1853, and Jansson's longtime friend and follower Jonas Olson returned from California and came to lead the community, along with six other trustees.
[15] The dissolution, with members receiving personal shares of community assets, took place by 1862, after the American Civil War broke out, although court cases dealing with accusations of mismanagement and division of the colony's property were not resolved until 1879.
Although most stayed in the area, some moved to nearly Galva, Illinois (named for the seaport from which many had left Sweden) because it was on a railroad line that the Swedish community had been contracted to help build.
Letters home from Janssonists to their friends and family, telling of the fertile agricultural land in the interior of North America, stimulated substantial migration for several decades and the formation of a distinct Swedish-American ethnic community of the American Midwest including areas around Galesburg, Illinois as well as in Minnesota to the northwest.
The transformation of the Bishop Hill Colony from religious sect in Sweden, to fledgling outpost, to prosperous economic engine, and finally to Swedish-American community, marks a unique pattern of Americanization and assimilation.
Swanson (1998) has argued that this transformation and Americanization resulted from the degree of interaction between the colonists and the local citizens of Henry County: the colony was not insular, as the many documents held in archives of Bishop Hill demonstrate.