Danish Emigration to America

How many left

Before 1850 only a trickle of Danes crossed the Atlantic, around 60 a year. That changed in the following decades. About 11,000 left in the late 1860s, more than 36,000 in the 1870s, and the 1880s were the busiest decade of all, with 1882 the single biggest year, when 11,618 Danes emigrated to the United States. By 1914 the total had reached about 300,000. Copenhagen police kept a register of emigrants from 1869, and those records, now indexed by the Danish Emigration Archives in Aalborg, are a treasure for families tracing their people today.

The emigrants were mostly young, and more men than women went: on the America-bound steamers there were about 65 men for every 35 women. Contrary to what many descendants assume, emigration was not heaviest from the poorest districts. The highest rates came from places far from the capital such as Bornholm, the far north of Jutland and Lolland-Falster, and from Copenhagen itself. Ringkøbing County in western Jutland, where many family records are kept, sent only about 5 percent of its people between 1868 and 1910, one of the lowest rates in Denmark.

Why they went

Denmark was not as poor as Ireland, Sweden or Norway in these years, and its farms were still making money. But the population was growing, land was expensive, and there were many landless people: farmhands, servants and the children of cottagers who had little hope of ever owning a farm. New heath land was being cleared in Jutland from the 1860s, but there was not enough for everyone. Many young people first tried their luck in a town, found that factory jobs were scarce, and then looked further.

America offered what Denmark could not. Under the Homestead Act of 1862, a settler could claim 160 acres by living on the land for five years. Railroads with land to sell and emigration agents worked hard to recruit. Steamships cut the crossing from six or eight weeks to ten days or two weeks, and many people traveled on prepaid tickets sent by relatives already settled in America. After Denmark lost Schleswig to Prussia in 1864, some Danes from that region also left to escape Prussian rule, and about 17,000 Danish converts to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with their children, moved to Utah between about 1850 and 1904.

The journey

There were several ways to go. The cheapest and most common routes ran through Hamburg or through England. Emigrants taking the English route usually sailed from Copenhagen to Hull, rode a special train across northern England to Liverpool, and boarded a large liner for New York. Conditions in Hull could be grim; one health report complained that migrants were treated "more like cattle than humans." From 1879 the Danish Thingvalla Line offered direct sailings from Copenhagen to New York, and from 1898 its successor, the Scandinavian America Line, carried on the service until 1935.

For western Jutland, a new harbor at Esbjerg, built from 1868 after Denmark lost its North Sea port of Altona, opened in 1874 along with a railway across Jutland. Esbjerg quickly became the gateway for butter and bacon shipped to England, and it gave the west coast its own link across the North Sea.

Danes in Nebraska

Nebraska became one of the main homes of Danish America. The first Danes in the state were Latter-day Saints who came to Florence, near Omaha, with the Mormon migration in the 1840s. Omaha later had a large Danish colony, with 2,430 Danish-born residents in 1900. The Danish-language newspaper Den Danske Pioneer was founded there in 1872, and the Danish Brotherhood in America in 1882.

Out on the prairie, Lars Hannibal led members of the Danish Land and Homestead Company from Wisconsin to Oak Creek in Howard County in the spring of 1871 and named the new town Dannebrog, after the Danish flag. The nearby Danish communities of Nysted and Dannevirke, where the first homesteads were filed in 1874, grew up as well. In 1890 nearly one in eight people in Howard County had been born in Denmark. The 1890 census counted 14,345 Danish-born Nebraskans, the most the state ever had. At Blair, Trinity Seminary grew into Dana College, which served Danish Lutherans until it closed in 2010. In 1989 the Nebraska Legislature named Dannebrog the state's Danish Capital.

Danes also scattered across the newer parts of the state. When members of the Gransgaard, Nielsen and Pedersen families came from western Jutland to Boyd County around 1890-1910, they joined this wider movement, trading the dunes and fjords of home for the hills and river bottoms of northern Nebraska.