Search the Ellis Island Wall of Honor
Read Another Account of Life in America (Lars Reque) on findagrave.com
Emigrating to America
This account was also written by Julia Reque
Sjur and Marta Gilderhus had four sons and two daughters. They were Andres, Anna, Lars, Gunvor, Nels, and Ole. When it was told throughout the Bygd (community) that people were emigrating to a new country called America, there sons and daughters of Sjur and Marta, now young men and women, all had a desire to go. During their childhood and youth many a time had they wondered, even yearned, to know what lay beyond those mountain peaks which seemed to encircle them. Now here was a chance to find out.
Tales were told of a real paradise across the seas. Andres, the oldest son, was to become the owner of the home farm according to the custom of that day (primogeniture). He was therefore a little reluctant to go. Lars, the second son, also hesitated, for after all would they not be leaving father, mother, home, friends, even civilization, as it were? Besides the stories they heard of the advantages in the new country, there were also tales of wild animals and wild people!
Nels, the third of the sons, decided to go. As had already been stated, the oldest son inherited the homestead. The other sons would therefore have to learn a trade. Nels was a blacksmith. As there was a smithy on almost every farm, he found this rather unprofitable, but he had saved a large part of his earnings. this he took and left for America in the spring of 1839. He was accompanied by Lars Davidson, a neighbor. There is meager information about their trip across the ocean. However, they arrived in New York on the fourth of July and heard the sound of musketry and the booming of cannon. They became quite alarmed, fearing there was war in this country. New York was only celebrating our national holiday.
Nels and his companion came on up the Hudson River to Albany, then by canal boat to Buffalo and up the Great Lakes by steam boat to Chicago. Arriving there, Nels went on to Fax River, La Salle county, Illinois. His desire was to get a farm of his own.
That same fall he enlisted the company of two friends and with a guide they set out for Wisconsin Territory to look for land. They traveled over much wild and unbroken country. They went by way of Milwaukee, then westward until they reached Dane County. Entering Albion Township they went north through Christiana and into the township of Deerfield where Nels found just what he had been seeking: a good heavy timer with rich prairie soil near by.
This part of Dane County was called Koshkonong, as it bordered on Koshkonong Lake and Koshkonong Creek. Nels then chose eighty acres of land in Deerfield townshipm and with the aid of Odd Himle, their guide and interpreter, he made out a description of his land and returned to Milwaukee to enter his purchase in the land office there. The rest of his party returned by way of Fox River to Chicago, while Nels spent the winter at Fox River, where his sister, Anna, and her husband, Knut Brekke, had just arrived from Norway. There were no settlers on Koshkonong at this time, so Nels became the first white man to settle in the township of Deerfield.
Nels' purchase of land is recorded in the land office at Washington, D.C. as March, 1840, but we must remember that all mail and documents ere transported either by stage or horseback, and it took weeks or perhaps months to make such a long journey. We have the word of Nels himself and also of Odd Himle that Nels and his companions went into Wisconsin in 1839, but we of the Gilderhus clan have adopted the year of 1840 as the year of Nels Gilderhus' buying and settling on his land.
In the summer of 1840 Nels Gilderhus with his two companions, Nels Bolstad and Magne Bystolen, returned to Koshkonong to settle on their respective farms, as Bystilen and Bolstad had by then also acquired each an eighty acre tract. These three friends then built a dugout on Bystolen's land, as they had no other shelter than their wagon to crawl under at night. They were still living in the dugout when his second sister, Gunvor, and her husband, Andres Lee, and their two small children arrived from Norway, and came to find a home with Gunvor's brother, Nels. Houses were under construction, and Nels had his completed with the exception of being chinked. Cold weather had set in early, so Nels had decided to leave the chinking until in the spring when it would not freeze and fall out.
As has been stated, Nels had again taken refuge in the dugout for the winter of 1841-42, and there Andres Lee and family also found shelter. Another bachelor, Andres Fenne, had also joined the group. Later in the winter a man named Tore Kaasa was also welcomed into their temporary home. There were now seven adults and two small children, all in one dugout.
In the meantime, Nels' oldest sister, Anna, and her husband, Knut Brekke, had moved from Fox River to Chicago, and later to Koshkonong. While in Chicago they owned their own house which gave quite a prestige to Knut Brekke among his acquaintances back in Norway. Knut Brekke's stay on Koshkonong was short. He was the first white person to be buried in Koshkonong soil.
Ole, the youngest son of Sjur Gilderhus, immigrated to America in the late summer of 1840. Nels went to meet him in Chicago. Ole and Lars Davidson Reque then came to Koshkonong with Nels. Each purchased eighty acres of land in Deerfield township. They returned to Chicago, however, where they worked on the Illinois canal.
Allow me to tell a rather humorous incident which took place while Ole was working on the canal. The work was both hard and sloppy, and one day as a fellow worker was wheeling a barrow full of mud over a plank, he slipped and fell into the canal, with wheelbarrow, plank, and all, much to the amusement of the others. After he was rescued by his comrades, and they had scraped the mud from his clothes, he resumed work. But as his sheepskin breeches became dry, they rattled every step that he took, and the more he hurried the more his breeches rattled. Sheepskin knee breeches were used by the peasants of Norway at that time, and this fellow had just lately come over to this country. I may add that this same fellow became the richest Norwegian in Chicago in his day.
Ole and his friend also spent some time in the lead mines in southern Wisconsin. After a few years Ole returned to Koshkonong to take up farming.
In 1843 Andres Gilderhus, the oldest brother of Nels, sold the Gilderhus farm and also immigrated to this country. He came to Koshkonong with his family and bought land just south of his brother Nels' second farm and across the road from his sister Gunvor Lee (the tade Olson and Nels Nelson acreage). Now only Lars remained in Norway. By 1850 he also had come, and had acquired a farm in the township of Cottage Grove, about five miles from his brothers and sisters; he later moved to Dodge County, Minnesota. Now they were all in this country and all in the Koshkonong territory. After Anna became a widow, she remarried. She died a few years later. Her body was the first to be buried in the Lake Ripley cemetery, just established by the Scotch Presbyterians of Oakland and Cambridge, her home being near the last place named.
All of them had now seen much of what lay beyond those mountain peaks in their home "Bygd". They had experienced many a heartache, many a homesick hour, but they did not complain or whimper. If there was not enough to eat, or the house was cold, they made the best of it. They were real pioneers, the very first to settle in a new community, the first to build homes and to break the virgin soil These pioneers had what May Scott Christianson so beautifully puts it in a greeting to the Gilderhus reunion in 1933: "May the descendants of the Gilderhus brothers and sisters now only retain the fine qualities of courage, honor and leadership, intelligence, initiative, and stick-to-it-iveness that these pioneers possessed, but increase in these powers".
Yes, they surely had all these qualities. They brought their troubles in their Faith to the Lord, and willingly carried on. What had been only wilderness, through their zeal and hard work, became a settled community.