Finding Minnesota: Swensson Farm

MONTEVIDEO, Minn. (WCCO) -- At some point we've all wondered what it would be like to go back in time, but you don't need to go any further than the Swensson Farm in Chippewa County to get that experience.

Imagine a piece of land with nothing, turned into a little bit of everything by the hands of a strong yet eccentric Norwegian.

"He was a unique immigrant to say the least," June Lynne said.

Lynne is executive director of the Chippewa County Historical Society and she's talking about Olof Swensson. He built his turn of the century 22-room brick farmhouse near the towns of Montevideo, Granite Falls and Maynard.

"The house itself is as if the Swensson's just left it yesterday," Lynne said. "The foundation on this home alone is so massive it quite probably took him 10 years alone just to build the foundation."

"You look at them rocks that are in the basement," neighbor Wally Sletten said. "By today's standards, you'd have one 'H' of a time to move them. They did it back then with horses and block and tackle."

And it wasn't the only thing this husband and father of eight built. He put up a timber-framed barn, which is now the largest pure barn preservation project in the United States. He also made his own shoes, his own family tombstones, even his own chapel on the second floor of his house. His congregation never fell asleep, because they were never there.

"Initially, his family and friends actually joined him for  worship service, and one by one they became disenchanted and they left," Lynne said.

They may have left because the services were long, and Olof had what Lynne calls, "Olofisms."

"This is Olof Swensson's proposed amendment to the U.S. Consitution, written in 1892," she said.

Olof's amendment talks about workers' rights well before unions were around, and prohibition decades before Americans were talking about the dangers of alcohol. He also ran for governor, unsuccessfully.

But the Swensson Farm isn't just known for history, it's also known on the big screen.

"There was a huge amount of that movie that was focused right here, because we could offer them so much in one site," Lynne said.

Much of the 2006 movie "Sweetland," starring Ned Beatty and others, was filmed here. It's no coincidence that the movie was about European immigrants trying to make a new home in Minnesota.

"The interior was all done here. So the bath scenes that they showed was all done in our kitchen. Making the apple pie scene was done in our kitchen," Lynne said.

The movie helped put Chippewa County and the Swensson Farm on the map. That's the hope at the Swensson farm -- to make sure there's a future for this little piece of history.

"That's part of our goal is to make sure the way ag history was, continues to be told," Lynne said.

After Olof and his wife Ingeborg passed away, three of their children continued to live on the farm. The farm was bequeathed to the Chippewa County Historical Society in 1967 by the last surviving member of the family, John Swensson.

The Swensson Farm Museum is open for tours every Sunday from Memorial Day Weekend through Labor Day Weekend from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.
There will also be a horsepower event held on September 10th.