Fox River Settlement
[3] Opinions differ as to when they first arrived at the Fox River Settlement with some writers fixing 1835 as the year, Knud Langeland claiming it was 1836, and Prof. Rasmus B. Anderson arguing that it was 1834.
[4] In the spring of 1834, Jacob Anderson Slogvig, Knud Anderson Slogvig, Gudmund Haugaas, Thorsten Olson Bjaaland, Nels Thompson, Andrew (Endre) Dahl, and Kleng Peerson left for La Salle County; they became the first Norwegian settlers in Illinois.
There, he married a sister of the Slooper, Ole Olson Hetletvedt and became largely instrumental in bringing about the emigration of 1836.
[2] Relative to the founders of the Fox River Settlement, Gudmund Haugaas, one of the two first to record the purchase of land, had married Julia, the daughter of Thomas Madland, in Orleans County, New York in 1827.
He died of cholera on the homestead near Norway, Illinois in July 1849; his widow, Caroline, survived him three years.
The son, Nels Nelson, born 1816, married Catherine Iverson about 1840; he died in Sheridan, Illinois, in August, 1893, as the last male member of the sloop party, being survived by his widow and four of twelve children.
Nels Nelson Hersdal was born in July 1800, and his wife, Bertha, in May 1804; they were married a few months before the departure of the sloop.
Ole Hetletvedt, who located at Niagara Falls, New York, not therefore in Orleans County, New York, had three sons, Porter C., Sören L. and James W. The first of these, born 1831, became captain and later colonel in 36th Illinois Infantry Regiment in the American Civil War, and was Acting Brigadier General when he was killed in the Battle of Franklin.
Margaret Allen, the "sloop girl" born on the Atlantic, daughter of Lars Larson, married John Atwater in Rochester, New York, in 1857.
The settlement in Orleans County, New York, ceased to grow, the objective point of immigrants from Norway had been changed, and the Fox River region received large accessions, especially during the year 1836.
[2] Immigration from Norway, which heretofore had been more or less sporadic, in which individuals and very small groups were found to take part, now entered upon a new phase, beginning to assume the form of organized effort.
[2] This increased immigration is historically associated with two pioneers in New York, New Jersey, and Illinois: Gjert Hovland and Knud Slogvig.
In one of these letters from Morris County, New Jersey, 1835, he wrote enthusiastically of U.S. laws, and he contrasted its spirit of liberty with the oppression of the class aristocracy in Norway.
Hovland was well known in several parishes in the province of South Bergenhus, and hundreds of copies of his letters were circulated there; they aroused the greatest interest among the people and were no small factor in leading many in that region to emigrate in 1836–37.
In 1835, he returned to Skjold, Norway, and there married a sister of Ole O. Hetletvedt, the "Slooper" and one of the early pioneers of La Salle County.
Slogvig's return may have started the "America-fever" in Norway, though it took some years before it reached the central and the eastern parts of the country.
