Valders House

During the 19th century, Norway's population nearly tripled because of improved nutrition, the smallpox vaccine, and reduced infant mortality, intensifying demands for limited jobs, food, and especially farmable land. Combined with restrictive inheritance customs that usually passed farms to the oldest son, or to the oldest daughter and her husband if there were no sons, this left little chance for social advancement and often pushed younger siblings into farming, labor, or other work that frequently meant rural poverty. Farming in Norway was extremely primitive by the standards of the time, centered on subsistence rather than crops for sale, and even many larger farms did not use methods such as crop rotation or drainage systems; in western coastal districts, farmers often relied on hand tools instead of horse-drawn plows and harrows. Because only about 3% of Norway's land was suitable for agriculture and much of it was controlled by landowners, most emigrants came from lower social and economic classes, seeking wages and cheap land in the United States and Canada. This house, originally built in Valdres, Norway, in 1795, enlarged in 1860, and later moved from central Norway in 1975, was a modest-sized landowner's home purchased with its surrounding farm in 1866 by Torstein and Ingebjǿrg Rudi Moen, whose six children included five who left Norway for the United States and Canada.

Decorah, Iowa · United States