A community transplanted: the formative experience of a Swedish immigrant community in the Upper Middle West

Nineteenth-century European migration to the agricultural frontiers of the American Upper Middle West established axes of communication and migration between localities on both sides of the Atlantic. This study is a detailed examination of the transplantation of community between two such localities. It traces the emigration of approximately 85 households from the Swedish parish of Rättvik to the daughter settlement they founded in Isanti County, Minnesota, and compares the fabric of life they had known in the old parish to the one they established during the formative years of the new community. While patterns of social life were transplanted to the New World, economic adjustments to a new environment were unavoidable.