The Migration of a Building: Representation, Replication, and Repatriation of an Emblem of Norwegian, Norwegian American, and Norwegian-American-Norwegian Identity

In the closing of her important overview of scholarship on heritage making and heritage regimes, Kristin Kuutma (2013) calls for scholars not only to investigate ways in which processes of heritage making harm communities or violate rights, but also “moments of empowerment, real instances of emergent agency, and situations where local actors partake in grass-roots policy-making” (33). The present case study seeks to do just that: to highlight the very concrete ways in which a succession of communities in both Norway and the United States have organized meanings about themselves, their histories, and their present and future through relations with a single building, known variously as the “Norway Building,” the “Little Norway stave church,” and (most recently) the “Thams Pavilion” (fig. 1). The Building (as I will call it in this article) was constructed in 1892–1893 in Orkdal, Norway, to be displayed at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition (better known as the Chicago World’s Fair). In 1935, after a period of private ownership in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, the Building was moved to Blue Mounds, Wisconsin, where it became an anchor feature of the Little Norway open air museum. It enjoyed a place of honor there as the gallery for displays of Norwegian and Norwegian American art and high culture—including an original score by Edvard Grieg and various paintings by Norwegian American artists—until the closing of that museum in 2012. In 2016, after a dearth of American philanthropists had stepped forward to rescue or maintain the Building, it was purchased and transported back to Orkdal, where it is now a cornerstone of the municipality’s current tourism and civic engagement efforts. Although the Building itself is now physically located in Norway, a virtual reality record of it remains in Wisconsin, viewable at the newly opened Driftless Historium in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, a museum whose website proudly describes it as “Wisconsin’s newest cultural destination” (Mt. Horeb Area Historical Society, n.d.).¹

Fig. 1.

The Building in its Little Norway context, 2015: “a lovely little piece of Norway in the middle of Wisconsin” (Crown Prince Harald, 1965; quoted in Winner 2015; photo by Thomas A. DuBois).

Tracing the Building’s high-profile migration across two continents over the course of a century and a quarter allows us to glimpse some of the negotiations and (re)imaginings that Kuutma and other folklorists and ethnologists like Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998), Susanne Österlund-Pötzsch (2003), Barbro Klein (2006), and Lizette Gradén (2003; 2004) have examined in their studies of heritage making, particularly in Nordic and Nordic-American contexts. As I hope to demonstrate, people’s uses of the Building were always strategic, linked to notions of heritage as understood by individuals engaged in both the financial and the physical relocation of the Building. As a physical space, the Building came to display particular understandings of Norwegian heritage, while also creating a venue in which people could enact events important to their personal and communal identities. The specific aspects of Norwegian identity that the Building came to highlight, and the communal events that it came to house, have varied from era to era and place to place, as the Building traveled from late nineteenth-century coastal Norway, to a booming multicultural Chicago in the early 1900s, to the quiet rural Upper Midwest of the twentieth century, and then back to a materially and economically transformed twenty-first-century Norway.

Background: Norwegian Stave Churches and the Beginnings of Historical Conservation

It is instructive to begin this examination with a look at the development of Norwegian cultural preservation efforts, particularly in a nineteenth-century Norway joined in a union with Sweden. In the complex articulation of a distinctively Norwegian identity—one neither Danish in language nor Swedish in material culture—stave churches came to play a central role.

The story begins in a Swedish interest in progress and a nineteenth-century commitment in...