Prelude to the Future: Multiple Faces of the Lindsborg Legacy
A Swedish-American Community in the Heart of Kansas
Lindsborg Chamber of Commerce, Lindsborg, Kansas

...more than a million of Sweden's sons and daughters have come to these shores to share in creating the great symphony of American life... Bethany College, Lindsborg, and the Smoky Valley have deep roots in the tradition of Swedish life and culture. The Swedish King's visit [in 1976] became a symbol of hands across the ocean in grateful remembrance of the legacy transmitted by the Swedish immigrants and their descendants during more than a century. Basic in that heritage is a great and meaningful spiritual endowment. The King of Sweden symbolized a unique and real continuity between the past and present. It was good to see the Stars and Stripes side by side with the yellow and blue of the Swedish flag. - Dr. Emory Lindquist, "The Meaning of the Visit of The King of Sweden," The Bethany Magazine, Spring 1976, p.2.

Nestled in the Smoky Valley region of north central Kansas, the community of Lindsborg was settled in 1869 by nearly one hundred Swedish immigrant pioneers. They initially emigrated from Sunnemo and the surrounding parishes of Värmland Province in Sweden. With much anticipation, the first Lindsborg Swedes came to American, framtidslandet, their land of the future. A strict adherence to the Lutheran faith and an abiding love of music were at the center of their existence, although many of them in the early days were farmers.

Many other of the Lindsborg founders were craftsmen, educators, musicians, and people of many talents. Their passion for things cultural extends into the present day and is evidenced by the large percentage of fine artists, well-educated people, and musicians who reside in Lindsborg, a community of approximately 3,200 individuals. The immigrants' and early developers' multi-faceted cultural interests became the basis for what has happened here over the past 130 years. 

Lindsborg, Kansas History

Pre-Swedish immigrants; Native Americans

Before the Swedish-American pioneer settlers, the Native Americans roamed freely in the area (Lindquist, 1953, p. 10). The Indians were the ones who gave the name Smoky Valley to the Lindsborg area, as they saw a broad valley from elevated points on eastern, western and southern approaches, a valley through which a narrow river wound lazily. Bordering Paint Creek and Sharps Creek, tributaries on the south of the Smoky Hill River, Indians built camps numbering in the many thousands of inhabitants. The fascinating story of the area's early Indians is not well understood today, which is not surprising considering the misunderstandings of early conquistadors, explorers, pioneer settlers, the frontier military forces and even the biases of the United States government "Indian agents," along with our popular cultural portrayals of cowboys and Indians. According to records of sixteenth century Spanish explorers, the inhabitants at that time of what is now the Lindsborg area were semi-nomadic Native Americans who lived in a community named Tabás. Centered a short distance southwest of the present city of Lindsborg along the Smoky Hill River and its tributaries, this community was home to the Wichita tribe. The Little River Wichitas, whom Spaniards called Quivirans, were the first Kansas natives to experience white contact. According to Wedel (1981), in the summer of 1541 Don Francisco Vásquez de Coronado and his troops encountered "an inhabited rancheria with about two hundred houses... made of tanned cattle skins... and built like pavilions of tents. [Their general location was]... in the region between the northeast side of the great bend of the Arkansas and the Smoky Hill rivers just upstream from [modern] Lindsborg, Kansas" (Unrau, 1991, p. 15).

Dr. William Unrau (1991) writes that Great Bend sites, particularly those of the Little River focus, are distinguished by a large amount of debris, including Spanish chain mail finds by amateur and professional archaeologists. Located by J.A. Udden of Bethany College in the 1880s, the first and most celebrated find was at Paint Creek in northern McPherson County. Based on this physical evidence, Professor Udden was the first to interpret the Lindsborg area as Quivera. In recent years additional similar objects have been discovered near Lyons in Rice County. Scholarship has altered the view that American was a virgin land inhabited by non-persons called savages prior to the European invasion of 1492. Jennings (1976) states, "Contrary to traditional uncritical thinking, the Europeans did not settle a virgin land; they invaded and displaced a resident population" (Unrau, 1991, p. 15).

Hunters, trappers and traders crossed the Smoky Valley. Government surveyors carried simple instruments with the purpose of bringing order to the vastness of the prairies, so that claims might encourage people to settle on the land and share in building a new civilization. Isaac Sharp settled in 1859 on a creek which bears his name, southwest of Lindsborg. he was the first resident of the area following the Native Americans who lived here. Nearby Indian massacres caused him to move to Council Grove where he became a leading citizen and 1870 Democratic candidate for governor of Kansas.

As the frontier moved steadily westward and with the end of the Civil War, a new interest in the Plains area arose. Broken treaties, military attacks on the Indians, railroad building, and the Plains Indian war of the 1860's led to the invasions by Europeans and other migrations by pioneer settlers. Kansas experienced phenomenal growth during the 1860s. Late in that decade, the availability both of homestead land and of purchase-land from railroads through the federal promotion of private railroad building brought many European immigrant groups to settle and farm the land in central Kansas.

Swedish immigrants

While the future state of Kansas was still a part of the Kansas-Nebraska Territory, a few Swedes already had arrived in Kansas. However, the 1860 census, one year before Kansas statehood, listed only 122 residents who claimed Sweden as their place of birth. By 1890, however, the number of Swedish-born Kansans was 17,096 or 11.6% of the foreign-born population, exceeded only by immigrants from Germany and England.


For what is now Lindsborg and the Smoky Valley, the modern era of settlement began with pioneer Swedish immigrant settlement in 1869. An advance party arrived in 1868 and constructed a small building near what is now called Coronado Heights. The advance group also searched out mile survey markers for their purchased and homestead land in what became northern McPherson County and southern Saline County of central Kansas. The First Swedish Agricultural Company of Chicago purchased 13,160 acres of railroad land for the Swedish immigrant group from Värmland Province of Sweden.

In the Smoky Valley, Anders Bengtson Carlgren was the first actual settler of Swedish ancestry, arriving in Salina, Kansas on January 18, 1864. Only 13 miles northeast of present day Lindsborg, he established a homestead on February 15, living in a lean-to adjoining a large hollow tree. He returned to Sweden in 1893.

To understand the history of the Smoky Valley it is essential to know that the Lindsborg founders and these first settlers were people seeking religious freedom. They sought to practice their Lutheran religion as they thought pleased their Lord. These practices had often been discouraged or forbidden by bishops and officials of the Lutheran State Church of Sweden. These immigrants were läsare, pietistic Bible readers, and they left Sweden under the leadership of Lindsborg's founding spiritual leader, Pastor Olof Olsson, a 28 year old Lutheran pastor, musician, thinker, builder and dreamer of dreams. The emigrants came to their new land wishing to establish their idea of a pure Lutheran Church.

A new era for Swedes becoming Americans had begun. They came to the state of Kansas for a variety of reasons: changing economic conditions in Sweden which produced hardships, occasional crop failures, desire for freedom of religious expression as evangelical dissenters within the Lutheran State Church, a lure of adventure met by the promise of American life, or what developed as Amerika fever, especially expressed in reports through Amerika brev or America letters. The economic, religious and personal factors were strengthened in the minds of prospective immigrants by their vision of American as expressed in the meaningful Swedish word framtidslandet, land of the future.

There were disappointments, adversities, and hardships, but optimism reigned and the land became settled. Lindsborg, in spite of not being the first established Swedish-American community of the region, became, during the early stages of immigration, the center of Swedish life and culture in Kansas. Church development was absolutely pivotal and at the heart of the formation and immigration of the first large numbers coming into the Smoky Valley and surrounding communities. For Lindsborg, some observers might even argue that the community began as a theocracy and a church community. A controversy arose over a point of doctrine, the atonement controversy, which later resulted in a church break-away occurrence, notably the establishment of Rose Hill Mission Friends (Covenant) Church in 1874.

The Swedes in Kansas adapted themselves readily to American life, but they did not abandon the old traditions. Dr. Carl Swensson (1887) wrote, "We do not wish, even if it were possible, which it is not, to build a little New Sweden in this country. That would be as childish as it would be wrong. But on the other hand, we do not wish to become Americanized at the turn of the hand. That which happens too rapidly turns out badly" (p. 26). In summary, throughout the years the Lindsborg area community, with the Smoky Valley people of a wider area, have developed a rich cultural, educational and religious heritage. These facets of Swedish heritage stem from the early immigrants and are readily shared today.

For additional information regarding the history of Lindsborg and the Smoky Valley area you may wish to consult the following sources:

Jennings, F. (1976). The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and Cant of Conquest. New York: W.W. Norton and Co.
Lindquist, E. (1953). Smoky Valley People: A History of Lindsborg, Kansas. Lindsborg, KS: Bethany College Press.
Lindquist, E. (1976). "The meaning of the visit of the King of Sweden." Bethany Magazine, Spring 1976, p. 2.
Swensson, C. (1887). "The Swedes in Kansas." Luthersk kvartalsskrift, July.
Udden, J.A. (1900). An Old Indian Village. Rock Island, Illinois: Augustana Library Publications.
Unrau, W. (1991). Indians of Kansas: The Euro-American invasion and conquest of Indian Kansas. Topeka, Kansas: Kansas State Historical Society.
Wedel, M.M. (1981). The Deer Creek Site, Oklahoma: A Wichita village sometimes called Ferdinandina, an ethnohistorian's view. Series in Anthropology, 5, 15. Oklahoma Historical Society.