A lot of Scandinavians immigrated to North Dakota. To celebrate this fact, Minot created the eclectic Scandinavian Heritage Park. We stopped for about half an hour on Wednesday morning and saw what there was to see.
The Sigdal House, built in 1771, was brought over from Norway. It is billed as the oldest house in North Dakota, but since it’s only been in the state since 1991, this seems a bit of a reach. I somehow neglected to take a photo of the outside. Imagine any log cabin you’ve ever seen and you’ll get the idea. The painted decorations on the inside were impressive.
This is a reproduction of a stave church in Oslo, Norway. We learned that the “a” in “stave” is properly pronounced like the “o” in bottle.
Grinning faces represent the 12 apostles. I was unable to discover which ones had their tongues sticking out. The chairs, I presume, were not authentic.
The little building with dead grass on the roof is a storehouse, called a stabbut. It was built in Norway as a reproduction of a famous one and shipped to Minot. It was tiny inside.
There was a waterfall because, according to the brochure, “water plays a large part in the lives of Scandinavians.” There was also a sauna, a windmill, a floating stone globe, a statue of Sondre Norheim, the “Father of Modern Skiiing,” a statue of Casper Oimoen (“credited with initiating the forward-lean to ski jumping in America”), and a plaza with a map of Scandinavia.
Oh, and this statue of Leif Eiriksson, “the first man of European stock to step ashore in North America in about the year 1000.”
We wandered around the gift shop, where I asked a troll if there were red chairs in Denmark.
I spotted this sign across the road from the park and did what it says.
