170 mGrocer and Cooperative Store in Skovlund
Shows Skovlund’s commercial life and community, which the emigrants came from.
This stop is about the great emigration to America as seen from the Skovlund/Ansager area. Here, the large numbers become less abstract: young people from rural districts broke away, left behind what they knew, and set course for the USA and prairie regions including South Dakota and Montana.
Emigration was not just a thirst for adventure. It was connected to a Denmark in transition, where many sought to leave agriculture, and where the opportunity to obtain land in North America had a powerful pull. For some, the journey to America became a chance to build something of their own; for others, it also meant encountering distance, toil, illness, and homesickness.
The story of Anna and Johannes from the Ansager area gives emigration a human face. Their journey leads from Denmark across the Atlantic and onward to Danish communities on the prairie, where the dream of land and a new life was to be tested in harsh surroundings.
The old emigration records show how concretely such a journey can be traced: name, age, occupation, residence, place of birth, destination, and date of the travel contract. A dream of America can therefore begin as a local story and end as a line in an archive – with an entire life in between.
Anna Poulsen Vad and Jens Johannes Christensen Bank emigrated as unmarried people from the Ansager area in 1905. They left Liverpool on February 25 aboard the RMS Caronia and arrived in the USA on March 6, via Ellis Island.
The journey was not entirely blind: the passenger list gave Johannes’ brother Jens Christensen in Volin, South Dakota, as their destination. For Anna, the same address was listed with the relation “brother-in-law”. The American dream therefore began with a steamship, a paper trail, and a specific place to land in mind.
Den 14. marts 1906, Anna and Johannes were married in Irene, the neighboring town to Volin in South Dakota, where they lived. The area was not Danish by chance: many Scandinavian, especially Danish, immigrants had settled here in the late 1800s.
Shortly afterward, Anna was expecting the couple’s first child. At the same time, Johannes found an advertisement in the Danish-language newspaper Dannevirke about a new Danish colony to the west. A wedding in Irene thus also became the beginning of the next move out onto the prairie.
Dagmar in northeastern Montana was founded as a Danish colony in 1906. Johannes Christensen was among the seven men who went west when the planned site in North Dakota had already been taken.
Each man took a land claim of 160 acres. For Anna and Johannes, the dream of free land meant a life far from a doctor, school, church, and grocer. However, the colony soon got a school, and teaching took place in both Danish and English.
In 1909, Jens Johannes Christensen became seriously ill in the Danish colony of Dagmar in Montana. The sources do not fully agree on the month or cause of death, but the death affected a very young settlement, where Anna was left at age 29 with two small children, a farm, and another child on the way.
The cemetery had not yet been established, although the matter had been discussed. Johannes thus became one of the first to make it necessary.
In the autumn of 1909, a letter from Anna reached Denmark: she had gotten into difficulties and needed help. Her 16-year-old younger brother Ingvard was sent to the USA and crossed the Atlantic aboard S/S Hellig Olav.
Anna was left alone with three children after Jens Johannes had died of typhoid fever as a farmer in the Danish colony of Dagmar in Montana. The farm was sold, and on 20 May 1910 the little family returned to Denmark.
