Scandia: The Scandinavian
Colony
The Scandinavian Agricultural Society
purchased twelve of the best sections of land in Republic County
in 1867. It was purchased in trust for the company by Englebreth
H. Hanson, and was not in one tract but was scattered up and down
the Republic River from the most southern part of the county to
the most northern part.
This Scandinavian Agricultural Society
had been organized by Scandinavian workmen in Chicago sometime
in 1867. Buffalo hunters had told of the wonders of northern Kansas
and it was decided to form a company to colonize there. Agents
were sent out to locate land, and in October of 1868 a group of
thirty of the members set out from Chicago. They came to Junction
City by train. There three hundred farms of one hundred sixty
acres each had been laid out from Lake Sibley, in Cloud County,
to the north of Scandia. These were numbered, the numbers were
placed in a hat and a girl drew a number for each man. Part of
the party remained in Junction City for a time; the rest set out
for the land of the colony afoot except for one or two men in
charge of a load of provisions belonging to the company and hauled
in an oxen-drawn wagon.
This group included M. Johnson, Charles
Lesom, P. Walin, John Lundin, O. G. Strom, R. Granstadt, A. Bergren,
A. Erickson, J. R. Sandell, John Holstrom, Peter Johnson and Andrew
Johnson Floodberg.
In early November, they came to a place on the Republican River
that they named New Scandinavia (later Scandia). The men lived
in dugouts while they built the colony
house. This house, which was to serve as a temporary home
for the men and as a block house in time of Indian danger, was
frame, and was walled up on the inside with stone. The windows
were equipped with four-inch oak shutters that were put in place
only when rumors of Indian attacks came. Each shutter had four
portholes for guns.
The houses in New Scandinavia were
of log and built end to end so that the end of one was also the
end of another. Out on the farms, there were sod houses or dugouts.
In the spring and summer of 1870 they
started going out to the claims in crews, working one claim a
day. Later this same summer they moved out to the farms. These
men knew very little of farming because they were nearly all tradesmen.
Most of them were Swedes although some of them called themselves
Norwegians because they had gone to the capital of Norway to be
graduated in their trades.
The colonists had homesteaded about
this land to make the colony unbroken by other nationalities.
The company land had been divided into seventeen plots so that
no one man would have all his land from the best or from the worst.
The village had been laid out in lots that were also divided in
proportion to the money invested by each man.
New Scandinavia became Scandia in 1876.
It was incorporated as a city of the third class on March 28,
1879. The growth of the town was slow until it got a railroad.
The first train came into the town over the Atchison, Republic
Valley and Pacific Railroad (later the Missouri Pacific) on December
24, 1878. This was the first road into the county and Scandia
boomed for a time.
The first post office was opened in
the colony house on July 1, 1869, with Englebreth H. Hanson as
postmaster.
The first store was built in the fall
of 1869 by J. A. Sandell. It was eight feet square and the first
stock of goods invoiced at $125. The first hotel in the village
as well as the first in the county was opened by L. C. Hanson
in the spring of 1870 and was known as the Hanson House.
The first bank was opened in February
1879. The first church to be organized by the Scandinavians was
the Swedish Lutheran in June of 1873.
Scandia today is a prosperous town,
second in size in the county. It is still the center of the Swedish
settlement.”*
Map of Republic County
More Information on the "Scotch
Plains"
Sources
*Ida Lucretia Smith, “A History of the
National Group Settlements in Republic County, Kansas” (M.
S. thesis, Fort Hays Kansas State College, 1933), 7, 8-9, 11,
14, 23-24, 25.
Smith, Ida Lucretia. “A History of the
National Group Settlements in Republic County,
Kansas.” M. S. thesis., Fort Hays Kansas State College,
1933.
