The widowed Margret Hjelmeland Knutson traveled with neighbors to homestead in Aurora County in the early years of settlement. Twenty-one years earlier, in 1861, she and her husband had left Norway and journeyed across the ocean, a nine-week voyage that took the lives of their two young sons. Settling in Illinois, Knutson gave birth to nine more children and mourned the death of two of them. When the youngest child was only two years old, Knutson’s husband died, leaving the widow to raise seven children on her own. In her memoirs, Knutson’s daughter, Martha Knutson Allen, wrote about her mother’s decision to homestead in Dakota Territory: “Rumours of the wonderful climate, soil, and opportunities for home making reached Pontiac and Rowe, Illinois. Many families prepared to venture into the wilderness to make their fortunes and brave the Indians and coyotes.”
The promise of free land and agricultural opportunity attracted a number of immigrants from Europe, predominantly Germans and Norwegians, to settle in Aurora County during its first decade. In 1890, the foreign-born comprised 23 percent, a little less than one-fourth of the county’s population. Of those born outside the United States, 46 percent claimed Germany as their place of birth, 22 percent were natives of a Scandinavian country, mostly Norway, and another 16 percent were born in a country ruled by Great Britain. Immigrants from Germany, many of them actually from Luxemburg, settled most densely in the southeastern townships, while those from Norway settled in the northeastern townships. The ethnic influence was strong, though, with one-half of all children in 1900 living in a home where the head of household claimed a foreign birth.
Although some came directly from the old country to Aurora County, many others gathered first in nearby midwestern states and then travelled with family and neighbors to settle in the county. In 1900, four out of five American-born adults living in Aurora County were born in midwestern states, predominantly Iowa, with a significant number born in Illinois, Wisconsin, or Ohio. New York was the most common birthplace of the older members of the county, with a little more than one-fourth of those aged fifty years and older born in that state.
Almost all of the younger members of the county, 97 percent of those younger than the age of twenty-one years, were born in the United States. Most of the children were born in South Dakota, with one-fourth born in another midwestern state, and barely one percent born in an eastern state. Only a handful of people were born in southern or western states. The population was close to 100 percent white in every census. In the very early years, though, a Chinese man ran a laundry.
In making her decision to homestead, Margret Knutson hoped that the beneficial climate of Dakota Territory would heal her daughter, diagnosed with tuberculosis, and provide a good home for her family. Waiting one year, until some neighbors had established their homes in Aurora County and could provide advice, Knutson, now aged forty-six years, borrowed two hundred dollars and, with another family, chartered a railroad car to transport their belongings to Mitchell. From there, she transferred her possessions to a wagon, tied her two cows to the back, and travelled another eighteen miles to stay with friends before settling on her homestead in Hopper Township, near other Norwegian immigrants.
Knutson, like other widows, came to take advantage of the federal land laws that allowed any head of household, male or female, to claim 160 acres of government land. Her neighbors from Illinois helped her to get started in 1882, and she, in turn, helped other neighbors who arrived later.
Many of Knutson’s descendants lived in the county all their lives, and some still do, including members of the family of granddaughter Agnes (Lawrence ) Larson. Knutson’s daughter wrote that “Mrs. Knutson always said the happiest days of her life were spent in South Dakota.” The widow died at the age of seventy years and was buried in the cemetery on the land she homesteaded. The Knutson Cemetery is located about three miles northeast of Plankinton on 392nd Avenue.
Note: The story of Margret Hjelmeland Knutson, written by her daughter Martha Knutson Allen, is available at the South Dakota Historical Society in Pierre, SD, in the Aurora County folder of the Pioneer Daughters Collection, collected by the General Federation of Women’s Clubs in the 1940s.
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It Happened Right Here: The Ethnic Influence, by Ruth Page Jones. Published in the South Dakota Mail, Plankinton, South Dakota, April 28, 2016.
RPJ Histories - Ruth Page Jones 