Tradition, Culture, and Memory in a Foreign Land: The Housing Choices of Norwegian Immigrant Anna Christopherson Goulson

“Over the edge of the bank, the path turned and went slanting down close against the grassy bank that rose up like a wall. Laura went down it cautiously. . . . The path stopped at a wider, flat place, where it turned and dropped down to the creek in stair steps. Then Laura saw the door. It was like a house door, but whatever was behind it was under the ground.”¹ Laura Ingalls Wilder used this passage in On the Banks of Plum Creek to recall her first impression of the Minnesota dugout that was soon to become her home.² Such dugout homes typified the early settlement period in the upper Midwest during the initial opening of new farms in the mid- to late nineteenth century; they served as both temporary shelters for weathering the first few winters and subsistence dwellings for pioneer farmers saving to build more permanent frame houses.³ Further describing the dugout in Minnesota, Ingalls Wilder explained it was meant to serve only until the family could afford to build a frame house: “‘It’s only till I harvest the first wheat crop,’ said [Laura’s] Pa. ‘Then you’ll have a fine house.’”⁴

Like the fictionalized Laura and her family, Norwegian immigrant Anna Christopherson Goulson’s dwelling choices followed a similar pattern. She and her first husband, Lars Christopherson, arrived in Minnesota in 1869 and lived in a dugout while they worked to save money to build a permanent dwelling. Financial matters proved challenging, however, because of the Panic of 1873 and crop damage from grasshoppers during the mid-1870s. About ten years later, Anna and her second husband, Hans Goulson, moved a short distance into a newly built balloon frame structure. Taken together, these two dwellings provide a rare extant example of a pioneer family’s transition from temporary to permanent housing and offer a glimpse into the decisions that resulted in this evolution. The Christopherson/Goulsons’ Norwegian heritage and its impact on the family’s housing choices are especially useful for understanding the ways in which immigrants blended tradition, culture, and memory with the basic needs of survival in a foreign land. Once thought of as a unidirectional assimilation to the dominant culture, these dynamic familial and social negotiations clearly involved an interweaving of homeland and new-land cultural elements.⁵ The family’s negotiations of a Norwegian-American identity are imbedded in and structured by decisions such as house type and plan, style and decoration, and location.⁶

The inquiry into the Christopherson/Goulson dwellings grew out of the present Goulson family’s interest in memorializing the dugout site and teaching its history to the next generation. During a reunion in 1998, the family placed a plaque in the depression that marked the dugout site and dedicated it to the memory of Anna Christopherson Goulson and her family. This event prompted renewed interest among family members in Anna’s dugout home and resulted in an archaeological investigation of the site.⁷ This study, conducted in 2002 by the author, focused on learning about dugout house construction and use in frontier areas and on exploring Anna’s life in frontier-period Minnesota. In particular, the family had many questions regarding the dugout’s comfort and duration of use.

Ironically, on the final day of the archaeological excavation at the dugout site, a family member revealed the existence of the original balloon frame house into which Anna and her family moved when they left the dugout. The small one-and-a-half-story frame house, likely used by the Goulson family from about 1880 to 1903/1904, is currently tucked away amid a group of round metal granaries. Unlike the rather exotic tale of the dugout house, which featured prominently in descendants’ stories of Anna’s early life in Minnesota, the frame house was largely left out of the narrative, seemingly hidden in plain sight. The structure’s use as a granary beginning around the turn of the twentieth century effectively transformed the family’s second dwelling into a...