Kallanäs – byn där nästan alla for till Amerika

It is sometimes difficult to understand that a third of Sweden's population emigrated abroad, mostly to America, between 1860 and 1930. A total of 1.4 million people emigrated, and among those born in the latter half of the 1800s, about 20% of men and 15% of women left Sweden. Tormented by injustices, poverty, hunger, and even starvation, it is easy to see why people chose to leave. In the USA, at least according to the stories and letters sent back to Sweden, the land of opportunity awaited, where anyone could succeed regardless of background. There was an abundance of arable land and few farmers who knew how to cultivate it effectively. Many were also attracted by liberal ideas about economics, politics, and individual freedom.

By the late 1860s, Sweden experienced several years of crop failures, which, combined with a rapidly growing population, led to unemployment and a lack of land to farm. This occurred at the same time that the USA opened its doors to extensive immigration, both through legislation and practical means. In 1862, the American Homestead Acts were enacted, encouraging foreign farmers to settle on land that had not yet been cultivated but had been violently taken from the indigenous peoples. What did the Dakotas, Ojibwe, and other tribes really think about the Swedes who settled on their ancestral land and claimed it as their own?

In some villages in Småland, almost the entire population went to the USA, and in Kallanäs, 33 people emigrated from the village between 1857 and 1908. It is enough to look around today’s Kallanäs to understand how incredibly deserted it must have become for those who chose to stay behind.

While hundreds of thousands of Swedes left Sweden, very few chose to move here. During the first half of the 1850s, 119 people came from Germany, 53 from Finland and Russia, and 46 from neighboring Denmark. Between 1851 and 1855, a modest 242 people immigrated to Sweden. However, between 1871 and 1910, Swedish immigration was significantly larger (240,413 immigrants), but this also included Swedes who had left for the USA a few years earlier. During the same period, 116,107 people returned from the USA, most of whom were Sweden-born returnees or their relatives.