Samuel Swenson Riveland aka Samuel Swenson (1844-1920)

SWENSON, RIVELAND, SWENSON RIVELAND, SVENSON, KIRKHUS

Posted By: Dorian Myhre (email)
Date: 6/14/2024 at 16:38:50

From Story City Herald July 29, 1920 (page 1)

OBITUARY

SAMUEL SWENSON

Samuel Swenson was born in Aardal, Norway, November 25, 1844. He was the youngest of a family of eight children, five boys and three girls. He grew up among the wooded mountains of that region of Norway and the impressions of the picturesque surroundings of his home near the deep Norwegian fjord he carried with him through life. The temperament of the person reared among mountains and streams was very evident in him to those associated with him daily. The love for the beautiful in nature, a deep attachment to home, a tendency to dream and muse upon the past, and an intense desire for human companionship and friends--these were prominent characteristics of his nature, characteristics which are much more rarely found in the person who has been reared on the plains or prairie.

His education did not extend beyond the common school, and at an early age he was forced to rely to a large extent on his own resources. His father's little farm did not offer sufficient inducement to keep him, therefore he decided to learn a trade. One of his older brothers was a carpenter by trade and he entered into a period of apprenticeship with him, becoming a very skillful carpenter. But other fields of activity soon drew him away from his first trade. His brother, Edwin*, who resides at present in Story City was engaged at that time in the shoe-making trade. Those were the days of the itinerant shoemaker. The shoemaker went from place to place, as has been the practice of the seamstress of out own day, making up shoes for the family from the material supplied him. Young Samuel decided to try his hand at this, his brother's trade, and he put in a year with his brother Edwin learning the art of making shoes. We have the word of Edwin that he became very skillful and proficient in making shoes. But the work and life of the shoemaker did not suit his nature. He desired more activity and movement than is permitted the man who works at the bench. Sea life seemed more attractive to him, and when an opportunity came to go to sea as a fisherman, he deserted the work-bench for the allurements of the sea. With a number of friends he had a small sail boat rigged up as a fishing vessel, and he spent one season at fishing cod and herring in the coast fisheries. As a business venture the undertaking was not ever reported as a great success, but the charm of the freedom and abandon of that life left to memory a host o pleasant recollections. His references to those days in later life indicated that they had grown mellow through time and that the slow paced years had dropped a golden mist about them. Yet, sea life did not have sufficient charms to keep him. The "wanderlust" within him was now growing beyond his control. America was beckoning to him with the alluring representations which had won over so many of his countrymen. In the spring of 1870 he left his native country for America never again to return. His passage was by sail boat and he was six weeks in reaching Quebec. He made his first home in Dixon, Ill., and there he continued to reside for three years. On the fourth of July, 1873 he was married in Earlville, Ill., to Rachel Kirkhus. Only a few of their most intimate friends attended them at their wedding. They left Illinois on that same day for Iowa, coming to Edwin Swenson* who lived at that time near Story City. They soon bought however, a piece of prairie land up in Scott township of Hamilton county, and this became their home for the next thirty-five years. Here Mr. Swenson gave the best years of his life. Out of the stubborn and rock-filled soil he had to make his living, and on the barren prairie he had to build a home. It meant incessant toil from dawn till sunset; work with bent back beneath the vivid sun and through long relentless winters. Few of the present generation can, perhaps, appreciate the full meaning of the life and the work of the man who settled down with a family on the barren prairie, with the past closed behind him, so to speak, with no supporting assurance of assistance from a father or a rich friend in the event of failure.

It was a work that tested the strongest souls; it was a work for real men only. And it was a work the work of men like this which developed the great agricultural resources and wealth of which Iowa is so justly proud today. Mr. Swenson left a comfortable and attractive home where were only sloughs and rock-filled uplands before.

*SUBMITTER'S NOTE: His brother, Eivend “Edwin” Svenson, is buried in Mamrelund Cemetery in Hamilton County, Iowa.