On the evening of November 21, 1919, Ollis Evenson, 59, was struck by an automobile and-by his own account-nearly killed. He had been standing near the intersection of Raymond and University Avenues in Saint Paul, Minnesota, when the vehicle interrupted his nightly walk from work to home. Later, he wondered how close to death he had actually come, though "thank God," he wrote, "I only lost about two square inches of skin on the back of my right hand. The driver did not even look back, but sped on like a streak of blue lightening."

It was the second time in just a few years that this Norwegian immigrant had been almost flattened by oncoming traffic. Such incidents, along with hundreds of others, were recorded by Evenson in a diary that spanned the years between 1897 and 1923. The diary fell into my hands for 25 cents at a garage sale held in a big, white house overlooking Saint Paul's Como Lake, a canoeing pond surrounded by oaks, maples, antique street lamps, and a pavilion used for summer concerts. Lying at the bottom of a box containing an overpriced collection of Mark Twain's works, which seemed strangely easy to ignore on this August morning in 1995, the diary "was screaming to be read," I recall saying to my wife.

It wasn't the original diary but rather a typed reprint sandwiched between bright red covers. One of Ollis Evenson's grandsons had rescued the fragile pages of the authentic document and retyped them as a retirement project during the mid-1980s. In a memo to family members, the grandson described how he had sought to preserve the family's heritage by typing up the diary entries "exactly as written by Ollis," including the misspelled words. He asked for help in trying to recover the diary's lost years (1901-11; 1915) and supplemented the project with two pages of family-tree information, a photograph of his grandfather, and a photocopy of Ollis Evenson's death certificate. All of it together constitutes a garage-sale masterpiece. Written for self-discovery rather than for publication, the diary is a message-in-a-bottle from immigrant America a century ago.

May 20, 1897: Today is my Birthday, being 47 years old. I may say right here, that I was born on May 20, 1850 on a farm named Froag in Norderhov, Norway, about 30 miles northwest of Christiania, the Capital of Norway. The house in which I was born was taken down some 8 years afterwards and rebuilt a short distance away on the island in Lake Juvern, where I have reason to think it still stands.

In most respects, Ollis Evenson was a typical Norwegian immigrant. He arrived in Saint Paul on August 16, 1880, with his brother Charles, who continued farther west to settle in Tacoma, Washington. Driven in part by a shortage of arable land, large-scale Norwegian immigration to the United States had begun in the 1860s, reaching its peaks in the 1880s and again in the decade between 1901 and 1910. Proportionally, Norway's rate of emigration during these peak decades exceeded that of every European country, with the exception of Ireland and Italy (the latter for the period from 1901 to 1920). By 1920, more than 700,000 Norwegian immigrants had arrived in the United States.

December 1, 1897: Went up for my citizenship paper, which I received with satisfaction, mingled with regret, as if every tie that bound me to my dear old Mother Norway, had been severed. Thank God! I know that I am still a descendant of the Vikings. I am yet a Son of Norway, and always will be to my dying day, although adopted as a foster child of this, the proudest Republic on Earth. I thank God for the land that bore me. I thank God for the land that adopted me. Lord, help me to be a good citizen of the latter, and to attain citizenship at last, in the New Jerusalem above, for thy Name's sake.

Fueled by technological change, social unrest in Norway in the late nineteenth century affected the young especially, and many of the immigrants of the 1880s were young, single people. If things didn't work out in America, there would always be a boat on which to return home.

If the immigrants knew a trade, as was true of Ollis Evenson-who apparently knew many-the possibilities of permanent relocation were enhanced. Jobs in the United States paid higher wages, and masons, carpenters, and other skilled workers did very well indeed during the many housing booms of the late 1800s. The filing-down of social differences also held considerable appeal for many Norwegian immigrants; their conviction that "in America no occupation was vulgar" somehow made old class-conscious Norway seem more antique than ever. Of course, such idealism itself soon became "filed down" for any new American immigrants willing to take an honest look at the slums, labor conflicts, and economic polarization that had emerged at that historical moment.

March 20, 1898: [At church] there was a series of stenoptican views illustrating Norwegian scenery, and it was very interesting to us all to make an imaginary trip to the "Old Country" and view with pride and delight its rugged and grand nature. I felt proud at having been raised amid such stupendous surroundings as these. God bless our dear old Norway.

After 1880 the prime locations of settlement for the new Norwegian Americans included New York City, Chicago, and Minneapolis-Saint Paul. Smaller groups moved west to the Dakotas and to the West Coast-Seattle, for instance. Of the three major locations, however, Minneapolis-Saint Paul, and Minnesota in general, were the only ones to be billed as the "Glorious New Scandinavia." Swedes, Danes, and a sprawling Norwegian settlement made of skilled laborers, professional people, and tradespeople traveled northwest on newly constructed railroads that connected the Twin Cities to Chicago.

Norwegian newspapers, pamphlets, and simple word-of-mouth communication held promises of employment and opportunity. Another payoff was the wooded geography of Minnesota, whose scenery and climate provided a direct reminder of lands left behind. As one letter published in a Norwegian-language paper put it, "But in Minnesota there is land in plenty," and as Ollis Evenson himself said, "The maples are weeping sweet tears." If he had ever wanted to live anywhere in America other than Saint Paul, Minnesota, which reminded him again and again of his Norway, he never told it to his diary.

August 28, 1900: [F]ather was this day committed to the Rochester Hospital for [the] Insane. As I, personally, had to figure prominently in the commitment, I hope and pray that I may be spared from performing a similar duty again. Oh-it was an awful hard thing to do! Lord have mercy upon us all!

Of course, not everything was rosy, in Minnesota or anywhere else. As the above diary entry tells, Evenson's father eventually joined his son in the New World, only to wind up in a mental institution. The cause was probably senile dementia, although various forms of mental illness were not uncommon in Minnesota's younger Norwegian American community, as well. One study of this subject concluded that, while it was very difficult to evaluate and interpret the mental states of immigrants, Minnesota's Norwegian immigrants had a greater tendency toward mental illness than did Norway's population at large. Uprootedness and dislocation, as well as the strains of transition, may well have figured into the equation.

January 24, 1897: (Sunday) Weather bitterly cold, stood 26 below zero at 7:30 A.M. Went to church.

Immigrants found themselves suddenly thrust into a world of religious freedom as soon as they walked ashore. Lutherans, Baptists, and Methodists all beckoned, though Protestant individuals could also try Catholicism, Unitarianism, or Mormonism if they wished. They could start their own religions if they really wanted to, or they could reject the idea and practice of faith, too. Not so for Evenson; each page of his diary brims with the language of faith.

Though he said little about denominational issues, clearly he was a devoted member of the Chicago-based Norwegian-Danish Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, which had moved northwest during the early 1880s. And it fit him well. The me churches were known for much that was admirable: spiritual vitality, distinguished ministers, loyal laypeople, a belief in the importance of higher education-traits that also characterized the life and mind of Ollis Evenson.

A typical week in any year of the diary had Evenson leading a prayer meeting on Sunday evening, participating in a midweek evangelistic service, conducting the singing at a four-hour funeral on Saturday, and preaching a sermon the following Sunday. He also found time to arrange hymns for the church choir and for on-the-spot counseling sessions, all of which were accomplished amid family responsibilities and the excruciating work-life of a turn-of-the-century tradesperson.

January 30, 1898: (Sunday) We went to church, and Rev. Wilson having a bad cold and sore throat, I took the Pulpit and preached to the congregation as well as I could. In the afternoon Otto Brack came to our house, wanting me to give him lessons in voice culture.

Evenson felt called to be a lay preacher, and nothing was going to compromise that calling. Repeatedly, he wrote of having to take the pulpit in his pastor's absence, delighted to feel "that God was very near to me the while" (Feb. 21, 1897); or to administer Holy Communion: "Being a lay preacher only, it certainly was a most novel experience for me to be called upon to administer the Lord's Supper to my Brothers and Sisters. It was the first and no doubt the last time in my life to render such an exalted service in the Church" (Feb. 16, 1913). That Evenson's pastor was willing to violate ordination codes in this way showed how much personal faith he had in his Norwegian American layman.

They had a colorful history, these immigrant lay preachers who often functioned as the right-hand servants of their overworked ministers. Other times they worked alone, building churches of their own, usually against the public will of the trained clergy. The first Scandinavian lay preachers were described as rugged and hardy, like Old Testament prophets. They preached repentance and evangelism, and many possessed fine intellects despite their lack of formal education. "Haugeans"-or Scandinavian puritans long separated from their national church-were often Methodists or Baptists who had no problem with confronting and debating trained high-church ministers, whom they sometimes referred to as "papistical."

Evenson's lay ministry was of a more modest variety, though he may well have viewed himself as a lesser successor to the line of bold laity that had included Elling Eilsen, Claus Clausen, Paul Anderson, and other spiritually charged lay-dynamos of the nineteenth century. Eilsen, a blacksmith/carpenter/farmer by trade, had brought spiritual leadership to the Fox River community of Norwegians in Illinois and supposedly knew the entire Bible by heart. Clausen brought faith to the Muskego settlement in Wisconsin, where his flock petitioned a German Lutheran minister to ordain him. Anderson, a disciple of Eilsen's, fought constant illness and the death of his only child to "preach the Word with simplicity and plainness" wherever God led him.

Evenson would have found himself comfortable in the company of such laity, and like these predecessors he worked himself deeply into the hearts of his own faith community.

April 15, 1912: The white Star Liner "Titanic" rammed by an ice berg in the North Atlantic Ocean Saturday evening at 10. As I laid my pencil away, the newsboys were shouting EXTRA out on the street. Getting a copy, it had the terrible caption: "The Titanic foundered, 1347 lives lost!"

One of the most delightful features of Evenson's diary involves his constant efforts to stay aware of world events and, through reading, to cultivate a life of the mind despite his lack of formal education. As I read his thoughts, I found myself reminded of my own immigrant grandfathers, now long-passed, whom I vividly remember trying to tear themselves out of their blue-collar existences through reading when I was a boy. One grandfather, a Scottish-Canadian plumber, read and quoted Shakespeare often and was himself a lay preacher in the Detroit City Rescue Mission, where his preaching was clearly the best exercise of mind that opportunity could have afforded. The other grandfather, Polish-born and a General Motors factory worker, rose above his elementary-school education through a voracious appetite for news, the Bible, and the fundamentalist literature of his day. I wish they would have kept diaries.

At various times in his chronicle, Evenson spends days, weeks, and months following an important world event through to its conclusion, as if to lock away strands of history in memory's vault. At the time of the Spanish-American War (1898), for instance, he records this protracted sequence:

--February 16: "Learnt that the U.S.S. Maine blew up last night in Havana Harbor, Cuba. 253 men lost."

--March 29: "Congress does not like the President's peaceful policy. Seems to be in for war with Spain."

--March 30: "Preparations for war is being pushed with might and main by the government. The President is trying to avoid hostilities if possible."

--April 12: "Congress now wrestling with the war question."

--April 20: "The President signed the Ultimatum with Spain, giving that power until Saturday to decide what it will do, vacate Cuba, or fight with the United States."

--April 22: "The war is now on. The U.S. Gunboat Nashville took a Spanish merchant vessel, and towed it to Key West, Fla."

--April 28: "Our war vessels demolished the Forts at Matanzas, Cuba."

--December 8: "The Spanish and American Peace Commission at Paris finishes its task."

(First of two parts; click here to read Part 2)

Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc/Books & Culture Magazine.

Mar/Apr 1997, Vol. 3, No. 2, Page 31

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