Swedes in Texas

In The Swedish Texans. by Dr. Larry E. Scott, from which most of this chapter is taken, the story of Swedes in Texas is told as follows:

"Swenson was a friend of General Sam Houston, who encouraged the Swede to send back to his homeland for more Swedish immigrants to settle the vast and sparsely inhabited interior of Texas. Swenson did just as Houston had suggested, returning to Sweden in 1847 to recruit families from his home parish of Baarkeryd in northern Smaland. That first year only his sister accompanied him back to Texas, but the following year a group of 25 people, related to one another or to Swenson or Swante Palm either by birth or marriage, became the first group of Swedes to repeat the journey Palm had made a few years earlier.

Initially, they joined Swenson in Fort Bend County, but he soon sold his plantation (and its attendant slaves) and moved to a large sheep and cattle ranch east of Austin, which he named "Govalle" after a dialectal Swedish phrase roughly translatable as "good grazing." Govalle became Swenson's home for over a decade, during which time it was also the first home newly arriving Swedish immigrants would know in the New World. Swenson and his uncle arranged passage for the Swedish families from Smaland, and they, in turn, worked for Swenson in Texas to pay off the price of the ticket. Most of the early immigrants also bought land from Swenson—he owned some 100,000 acres in and around the Austin area- and settled down to farm cotton.

The city of Austin thus became the home of the earliest and largest concentrations of Swedes in Texas. North of Austin, in Williamson County, some of the first settlers bought land from Swenson along Brushy Creek and formed the nucleus of what eventually became several contiguous rural colonies: Brushy Creek, Palm Valley, Hutto, Jonah, Taylor, and Round Rock. On the Blackland prairie in northeast Travis County, Swedes began to settle after the end of the Civil War, establishing the colonies of New Sweden, Manor, Kimbro, Manda, and Lund. All these areas were almost exclusively devoted to cotton production, a crop which was, of course, quite unfamiliar to Europeans but to which they quickly adapted.

Swedes settled in Central Texas for a variety of reasons.

First, many of them had to work off their passage on the Swenson lands in and around Austin. Second, they tended to buy land in areas already settled by fellow Swedes whom they had known back home in SmSland. Finally, many of them were given favorable prices for land by Swenson, who wanted to attract as many of his countrymen to Texas as possible. Even though only about 150 immigrants had made the voyage to Texas before the outbreak of the Civil War, they were located in key agricultural areas of Travis and Williamson counties. When immigration to Texas resumed on a larger scale in the late 1860s, these "target" or "magnet" colonies which could attract Swedish immigrants in larger numbers were already well established."
On February 26, 1988, Audrey Bateman, author of the Waterloo scrapbook, wrote in the Austin American Statesman that the Swedish immigrants "were an industrious people- farmers and businessmen who enriched their new homeland by building churches and colleges. Texans gratefully accepted them as neighbors." In this same article, a description of a Swedish Christmas celebration in Austin was recorded by the editor of the Daily Republican newspaper on December 26, 1870: Night before last we attended, by invitation, a ball given by the Swedish emigrants,... We found a number of the present, the stout, heavy young men and buxom lasses in attendance who engaged in the merry dance, were of a class that our country could well be proud of- good looking hearty men and plump, handsome girls... We enjoyed most excellent music, we partook of a supper that would have done justice to Epicurus, and all the surroundings were of like character. There were lots of good folks in attendance and an abundance of the substantials as well as the luxuries of life... The ball was a success, and all enjoyed themselves in a happy manner."

By World War I, more than 11,000 Swedes had immigrated to Texas with large concentrations in Travis and Williamson counties.