PLAIN VIEW HERITAGE FARM,
RURAL BRYANT, SD, PRESENTS:
"Stadems Sail to America,"
Oline and Sjur & Family's Voyage,
by Ronald Ginther
VITAL STADEM STATISTICS ON SAILING TO AMERICA:
Berent Martin..................7 years old
Peder Johan....................5 years old
Ole Severin....................3 years old
Berntine Gurine................1 yr (actually 9 months old)
Berntine Gurine was baptized July 9, 1865 in Korskirken, Bergen;
the Family sailed from Bergen 25 April 1866.
Sjur and Oline and four children departed from Norway to America (via Canada) on BRODRENE, a Norwegian bark or barque, a wooden ship with fixed sails.
Departed Bergen 15 Apr. 1866, Arrived Quebec, Canada 27 May 1866, completing a voyage of 32 days, or about 4 and 1/2 weeks.
Father Sjur was 34 years of age, Mother Oline was 27 years of age.
Four children were survivors already, they had lost the first-born Ole, who was born and died, less than a year old perhaps, in Vik-i-Sogn, their starting home place. Ole Severin, of the four, produced no children and never married, the other three were fruitful in that respect.
Three more Stadem children were born to Sjur and Oline, over in Worth County, Iowa.
Oline and Sjur were married Dec. 29, 1857, in Hove Stone Church, Vik, in the dead of winter.
By the time they sailed to America they had been married 9 years.
Sjur was perfectly capable of supporting his growing family--but not with ease, but with difficulty in the circumstances back in Vik. That is why they re-located to Bergen, to prepare and gather resources for their voyage to America. In Bergen four children were born to him and Oline.
Norway was a hard place to make a living as a cotter or a landless farmer, who paid the land-owner part of his crops and labor; to make ends meet, Sjur also raised sheep as a hireling, and perhaps fished in the great Sogn Fjord if he could borrow someone's boat, and gardened as well. He could hire out as a general laborer. But there was no getting ahead in Norway without owning land, not in those circumstances: hence the move to America where there was promised a better future for a hard-working man and wife who knew how to farm.
Though a Danish-Norwegian subject of a Danish king earlier in life, the politics changed, and Norway passed to Sweden's overlordship. The adult Sjur Stadheim was a subject of the King of Sweden and Norway, a dual monarchy. He became a citizen of the United States in 1883 in Worth County, Iowa, April 10, 1883. He probably spoke Norwegian fluently all his life, reading and writing in it, listening to sermons in Norwegian at their church, and in a Norwegian-speaking family and rural community, he learned only a small amount of English.
In poor old Vik they left Baby Ole behind,
who was first-born of their family,
but in Bergen's better pastures
four children sprang forth,
the favor of God their parents could see.
Berent Martin, Peder Johan,
Ole Severin and Berntine Gurine--
these sturdy four "tupin" would sail to the New World
with their young, courageous Ma and Pa.
WHO WERE THESE STADEM ANCESTORS OF OURS?
Wife Oline Madsdatter was twenty-seven,
Husband Sjur Olson was thirty-four.
Oline held a 9 month old Berntine Gurine,
while Sjur managed the older three of the four.
Berent Martin was seven, Peder five, of the older boys--
they too could help tend Ole Severin age three,
who only cared for his toys.
Nine years wed, this couple learned the ropes--
by which success can be gained,
not by luck but faithful, steady trust in God,
and long-cultivated hopes.
Sjur's brother Knud, followed by Mother Britta,
had emigrated to Iowa already before;
Sjur had such to draw on,
and so to faith was added experience
to calm them when assaulted by
fears or self-doubts amidst the sea's surge and roar.
But are these just names thrown out?
Were they once real people?
Could it be WE were not even dreamed of,
there was just this one family
that had never known life in America the Bountiful?
"Here we have no continuing city,
but we seek one to come"--
that is the scripture by which they lived,
and all they had ever done.
Would their Shining City be found in America?
Amidst the broad acres of her heartland's prairie?
Well, unless they risked all,
they'd never find out what God had in store
for them across the watery waste of the Sea.
Oh, there's security in the present "Known,"
but if you can fight off panic, fear and trembling,
there's a golden promise in the "Unknown."
Pioneers, that they certainly were,
even before they set foot in America,
or heard "Ha det gud tur da!"
they had to conquer all the challenges
that naturally occur.
WHAT CHALLENGES DID THEY FACE BEFORE THE VOYAGE?
WAS THEIR TIME AT SEA JUST AN ORDEAL TO ENDURE?
Four and a half weeks...
at least there were services they could attend...
in chaplain-led worship of God they could forget
the strains and the awful shipboard reeks!
The Word of God assured them
that all was in His almighty care,
and their souls drew comfort and cheer
that was most welcome and fair.
Four and a half weeks aboard
cramped immigrant ship BRODRENE,
could strain every nerve and inflict sickness,
even death of a whole family;
but they had to arrive
at their destination in health,
or they'd be sent back--
it was the same for a poor man
and a man of wealth.
Sjur and Oline knew they
and their children were, thank God, all well;
but a weeks-long voyage,
how long before one or the other fell ill?
They could not tell.
Four and one half weeks at sea,
then down the St. Lawrence River--
only a Norwegian-born could contemplate it,
and not have a fit, shudder, and shiver.
The great Sea surges in Sjur's veins
though born a farmer
on the banks of Sognfjord.
Just the sight of the endless, rolling sea wave
doesn't frighten or appall him,
not at all, it strikes in his soul
a deep, welcome chord.
His ancestors plowed those same waves
with mighty vessels called the Knarr.
By them they could range for weeks, months,
even a year or two,
if they saw reason to go so long and so far.
Sjur could stand aboard the BRODRENE
as gulls swooped in their wake,
taking the broad Sea-Road to America!
Son of the Vikings,
it stirred up his slow blood,
and through his mind's eye ran
Greenland and even Vinlandish scenes--
and he chewed on them for long moments,
like a cow her cud.
Down in the hold,
in the long-bunked, fetid alleys
where the immigrants were stowed,
no such lofty scenes or feelings--
it took the open air
and the cold breeze
that flung back and salt-stiffened his hair.
Viking or not, he could not
tarry there too long,
he had three small sons
and infant daughter;
he himself was nothing, he knew,
without his family to belong,
and he loved his unshakable, steady,
square-jawed Oline Madsdatter.
Together they had weathered Vik
and made it to greater blessing in Bergen (and to the ship!)--
and the rest would come easier,
success in America was nearly in his grip!
Wife sewed into her hems,
from eggs she sold,
sheep he grazed,
to them it meant a chance
of new life
better than costly jems.He thought about their savings
No shipboard thief could steal it away--
just a few ore in his vest pocket--
a laborer's wage for a day.
What did Sjur see and know of life?
He himself was no stranger
to man's worst nature and human strife.
He knew the crook, burglar, and worse, the son of Cain
who would slit a man's throat
for a paltry gain.
As City Watchman, he knew all types of men;
on his night-long patrols
he encountered beastly
creatures that live not like men but trolls.
Nothing less than dissolute spawn
of Hell's lord, the Devil,
they lived only to commit a next, worse act of evil.
He knew there's always some
especially evil-hearted men,
in crew or Passage on the Sea;
blasphemers, ungodly in word and deed,
no woman was safe,
nor even the innocent babe she might breast-feed.
He knew of some who acted out of perverse nature,
using others in contempt
after being dealt with in good faith.
After all, Adam's first-born son murdered his brother,
so how much were men improved
since this tragedy of humanity's First Father and Mother?
He had seen the woman utterly ruined
in her tender youth,
huddled in the gutter
no longer wanted by evil men now,
so she starved,
unable to sell herself for bread and butter.
BERGEN WAS THE BLESSING-PLACE BEFORE AMERICA
Bergen's important to the Stadem Story,
the place where Stadems launched forth to failure or glory.
Norway's second city,
beautiful and vital in location,
today as great as it ever was,
Gateway to America in the West,
like Jacob's Bethel--"House of God"
birthed from mere earthly Luz.
These honest but penurious Stadems went from possessing
between little and nothing
to America's many broad acres with a grand future
and a hope--
for us, it started with an almost bankrupt Sjur and Oline,
when they left Vik behind
and the side of life that promises
more hard times, or, at best, lean.
Bergen prepared them for major changes to come,
if not for this city and its ways,
there wasn't much of value they might have
done.
Thousands others sought much the same lift in life,
but these, once in America,
melted into its race for material gain,
and, not resting in God,
reaped only vanity, emptiness, and strife.
In Norway they had farmed
and lived by revered Saints Days,
notched with a knife on the old wooden calendar stick.
In America there were no such olden ways,
generation after generation
followed cycles of the sacred church calendar.
In America you let out the barn animals to grass,
plowed, sowed, and reaped
on the day you thought best to pick!
How were Sjur and Oline prepared
for all of that?
Again, Bergen was the bustling Crossroads of Sea and Land--
you may be a simple farmer,
but next you on the park bench,
or in church pew, a banker sat!
Bergen proved the place
they learned to bend more than one way,
and that became a strength,
even though they eschewed the tumult of city life
and chose not to stay.
But what they knew in Bergen was good,
they bent toward it all the more,
since in the big city they could see
plenty examples of what sin could do
to both rich and poor.
Bergen still shone with renown
as Hauge's second home;
the fires of revival ran through
the whole city
and still licked at the shore's sea foam.
Three centuries before Hans Nielsen Hauge
Martin Luther over in Germany rescued the Gospel of Grace--
restored God's Word too to the people,
set it back in the Church in first place.
Then much the same dry rot
that ate out the life
of the Spirit and stifled the Gospel before,
returned to the Church in Norway,
and the Clergy themselves
made faith a matter of formal ceremony, kept the people spiritually poor.
A man of the people,
a honest farmer's son too,
that was bound to give Hauge's Bible teachings
a hearing with both Swede and Norwegian too.
Then ruled by Denmark, The Two Kingdoms had a Danish king,
it was no loss to quit as his subject,
for he maintained a governance
from which Christian Truth had long taken wing.
Hauge, God's man, raised up to restore the breach,
walked and journeyed everywhere in the land,
working with people to their gain,
and afterward he would take up the Bible to teach.
Doing Norway's people great good,
it did not matter to the authorities,
just as it was with Christ long ago whom worldly Temple Sadducees
and religious Pharisees bitterly withstood.
Trumped up charges were brought,
Hauge was imprisoned.
His crime? Earthly powers challenged,
not God's, but vain, selfish men's!
Sjur and Oline could not have
escaped hearing of him,
Bergen's favorite son, Hauge was, to many a citizen.
Evil hearted men nurtured evil
born in envy and pride;
they cared nothing for captive souls
for which Christ, to set them free, had died.
Of course, most people like Lot are content in the wicked city of destruction,
deaf to the warnings of God's Word
writ so clear,
it will take an angel sent in haste
to rescue them out,
lest they perish with the rest,
damned eternally to condemnation.
But Stadems knew they must
keep to God's Word and True Way,
and not commit sin,
lest the Devil hold sway.
Not like the foolish, the sinful,
the lost,
who all seek some passing pleasure,
but oh! The awful cost!
We can't say how much
Stadems saw of this,
when they left Norway in spiritual decline.
But Norway was even then much like Babylon,
that city of the world ruled by the Man of Sin,
who will come, rule and destroy,
declaring himself God,
crossing the fatal, last line.
Stadems knew from God's Word
this old world ends in fire,
and all its vain works
will be cleansed away,
a shining new earth will
arise for God'strue saints.
Ruling as kings and priests,
as the scriptures say,
they'll know peace and happiness,
in Christ's reign alway.
WHAT IS THE HAUGE-SVANOE-STADEM CONNECTION?
Hans Nielsen Hauge bought
an estate on an island to be called Svanoe.
He meant it to help reform a converted man
through the graceful gift,
but it failed in its effect,
to another man it was to go.
These Hauge-favored folk,
the Svanoe families,
emigrated to Minnesota,
Little Norway in America.
Alfred Stadem's daughter Myrtle
married Kalvog-born William Rennard Marion Svanoe.
William's Haugean-influenced, pastor father, Atle,
wrote on Lutheran laypersons' ministry,
and so two streams of Haugeanism,
converged--through Stadems and Svanoes--
in one union that produced fruit prolifically.
The Stadem line
born of Sjur and Oline,
would produce missionaries on three or four continents,
while from the home Bible Study of William and Myrtle Svanoe
was birthed a mother church
that in turn birthed not two or more churches, but twenty-three!
--by Stadem Descendant, Ronald Ginther, April 4, 2013
With all due respects and gratitude to Barbara Vorseth Benson, Family Historian, whose excellent Stadem genealogy furnished the vital statistics and really the framework for this piece.--Ron Ginther
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