Mm Links March 2014 Week 3

[rockfordill]

This is 'Good King John II' back for Week three.

I said last week that I would deal with the vast European immigration to the USA in the 19th century and how it affected life in the Midwest.

It may be apocryphal but I had always heard that the European migrants who flooded in to the East coast and were processed through the notorious Ellis Island around the 1850s basically walked west across America until they recognised and felt familiar with the soil of a region. So it was that Scandinavians came to Northern Illinois and Southern Wisconsin. Being part of the vast Mississippi basin the ground was very fertile and they knew how to deal with the bitterly cold winters.

I was fortunate to emigrate in the Queen Mary. I and my young family, wife and baby daughter and an old Bedford camper van. Strange to see that van being lowered dockside in New York. Then we drove west (easier than walking) . Anyone who has crossed Pennsylvania on the old Interstate 80 gets a tremendous impression of the rolling Appalachian mountains and we crossed the first of the two great American watersheds. The Eastern watershed runs more or less down the Southern Appalachians and the Blue Ridge mountains. Every drop of water east of there flows in to the Atlantic and every drop west flows into the Mississippi. This watershed is approximately 500 miles inland then the Mississippi basin is about 1500 miles wide to the great western watershed on the Rocky Mountains then another 1000 miles to the Pacific.

Well, we stopped driving west at Rockford, unloaded the van, bought a house and started working.

There were Swedes, Danes and Norwegians everywhere. The commonest name in the phone book I believe was Anderson. One of the biggest corporations in town was Sundstrand Corp which has parts on just about every plane built (including their famous black box recorder). We had Swedish banks, Lutheran Churches on every corner, smorgasbord meals etc etc. I first learnt to eat cheese and strawberry jam sandwiches in Rockford – and my favourite breakfasts, two eggs over easy, bacon, hash browns and a short stack of swedish with maple syrup! Yes a “swedish” anywhere else would be an English type pancake. In the winter the Scandinavians would drive out on the big frozen lakes, get out their ice augers, drill a hole through the ice and spend hours sitting with a fishing line through the ice. I never did cotton on to that activity!

The first Scandinavians were farmers, then came furniture makers and finally their machine tool experts and they were all highly skilled and very hard working. These were some of the people that built America.

[Psybbo]

I didn't expect to, Gen, just trying to help :-)