Danish books in Kimballton Public Library. 1991. (Photo: Mette Hald.)
“Each Tuesday afternoon at 2:30 p.m. you will find six ladies sitting down to coffee, sandwiches and dessert. Often the food is of Danish origin, as aeblekage or layer cake, both embellished with whipped cream, coffee cake and other Danish pastries. After the interesting conversation session, they retire to comfortable chairs in the living room, each finding the chair most suitable for them. Soon all are settled comfortably with handwork, to read and hear the next chapters of the Danish book now being read.
The Danish Reading Club has been meeting for at least seventy years.
No record was kept of the organization’s beginning. Throughout the years many interesting books have been read and discussed. The four volume series Priergaard Slaegten [The Priergaard Family] probably was the most interesting story of a family through several generations. Each member would read a chapter as most were first generation immigrants. As time went on, fewer wished to read but did enjoy listening.”
The above description of the Danish Reading Club, taken from Kimball
ton’s 100th anniversary book,1 is accompanied by two photographs of members of the club taken at an interval of 70 or 80 years.
The Club still existed in the spring of 1990 when, in perfect keeping with the above description, I was invited to join four ladies: Hilda Christoffer
sen, Alice Vitten, Dagmar Sørensen and Herdis Nielsen, for a cup of coffee. Of the four, only Herdis was born in Denmark; the others were born in the United States of Danish parents. All are (or were) married to Danes and spoke Danish in their homes until their children married Ameri
cans. We spoke a mixture of Danish and English together.
Kimballton has become familiar in Danish-American history as one of two neighboring villages in Iowa: Elk Horn and Kimballton. The villages took opposing sides when, in the 1890s, the Danish Church in the United States split into two factions - Elk Horn choosing to follow Inner Mission doctrine and Kimballton the teachings of the educator, writer and minister, N.F.S. Grundtvig. The towns have continued their friendly competition ever since.2
It was interesting to hear Dagmar Sørensen, hostess of the Reading Club meeting I attended in May 1990, tell of her days as a student at Grundtvi- gian Grand View College in the 1920s. One of her teachers there was the legendary Danish-American minister, Enok Mortensen.
I visited Kimballton while traveling around the United States in an attempt to discover how books and libraries provided support for Danish immigrants and their attempts to maintain their cultural roots. Although today these books and libraries are in little evidence, there is little doubt that they did, at one point, offer support. A number of people told me they remembered collections of books in Danish, as well as libraries and reading
The Danish Reading Club in Kimballton in the early 1900s. Left to right: Mrs. Bolt, Gudrun Vest, Mrs. Soren Sorensen, Mrs. Nissager, Mrs. Sorensen from Solvang (guest), Mrs. Etta Soe, Dagmar Bertelsen. (From Kimballton Centennial 1883-1983.)
clubs in the Danish settlements. Later on, the books were probably com
bined with other collections or simply discarded. Dagmar Sørensen from Kimballton explained that there had been a Danish library at Grand View College. Perhaps this is the library described by Thorvald Hansen, the now-retired Grand View College historian and archivist, in his book about Grand View College. He writes:
A large collection of books was made available to the library by the Danish People’s Society [Danish Folk Society]. This collection, num
bering some three thousand volumes, was loaned for an indefinite period.3
In his invitation to the meeting at which the Danish Folk Society (Dansk Folkesamfund) was founded in 1887, F.L. Grundtvig mentions the collect
ing and publication of Danish books as possible tasks to be taken up by the Society.4
An unpublished manuscript, Kirsten’s Saga, describes the life of a Dan
ish immigrant woman in Wisconsin toward the end of the last century.
After Kirsten’s arrival in Waupaca we learn that
...as she became better acquainted, Kirsten enjoyed an active social life, much of it revolving around the Danes Home Society. ... Mem
bers paid a 50-cent enrollment fee, and donated books in Danish and English so a library and reading room could be established... So successful was the organization that a $1,300 debt was retired in 1887, and there were nearly 1,000 volumes in the library..?
Thorvald Hansen did a commendable piece of work in listing all the loca
tions of the records of Danish immigrants in America. A study of this guide to source material provides some insight as to what might have happened to some of the books in the Danish collections. But not even the detailed index to Thorvald Hansen’s listing includes the words “library” or “reading.”
The existence of the books was accepted as a matter of course, making it unnecessary to describe them or their history in any detail.
This was another reason for my interest in meeting the four women in Kimballton - they represented a little piece of fast-disappearing, Danish- American cultural history.
The ladies told me that before the present public library was built, there had been a Danish library. In one corner of the library I found a catalog of books owned by the Danish Reading Club dated 1911 together with the rules of the club and a handwritten circulation list. The circulation list, with the date of each loan carefully noted, covers the period from De
cember 1911 to 1916. The years 1911 to 1916 are interesting because the list enables us to see what each borrower read during this period, when interest in the library was greatest.
The acquisition of new Danish books ceased at some point in the 1930s, and the two newest books listed were printed in 1936. One was Det Moderne Menneske (Modern Man) by Arne Sørensen (borrowed once) and the other, Mellen og Andre Fortællinger (The Mill and Other Stories) by Marie Bregen- dahl (borrowed 9 times).
It isn’t possible today to compile accurate library statistics for the period.
A number of the books no longer exist, and there is no date slip in some of those that do exist. I counted 440 volumes which had been borrowed a total of 8,215 times. That doesn’t sound like much until you stop to realize that there were only 382 persons living in the town in 1920. In the first years, the handwritten circulation records didn’t include the year (it was, after all, obvious what year it was!), but around 1922 a date stamp was introduced. It is therefore possible to determine that about 5,662 loans were made prior to 1922. After 1922 the books were borrowed only about 2,553 times. The Reading Club continued to exist because the members read their own books. The library stopped buying new Danish books, and the interest in
The Danish Reading Club in Kimballton in 1982. Left to right: Dagmar Sorensen, Esther Jacobsen, Amanda Boelth, Hilda Christoffersen, Herdis Nielsen, Amanda Herskind. (From Kimballton Centennial 1883-1983.)
older books naturally declined. I did note, however, that books by Thomas Olesen Løkken had been borrowed as recently as 1989.
Based on the previously mentioned religious parting-of-the-ways of Elk Horn and Kimballton, I attempted to classify the old books in Kimballton on the basis of religious ideology. For each book I determined whether the author (or possibly the publisher) could be thought of as a supporter of Inner Mission or as a follower of Grundtvig and proponent of the folk high school. As this aspect was of most interest to me, I attached greater impor
tance to books in both these groups than to other books in the collection. A total of 78 titles could be attributed to writers who favored the folk high school or other of Grundtvig’s ideas, while 45 books were written by au
thors whose sympathies lay with Inner Mission or were published by Inner Mission publishing houses. 13 titles classified under the heading “Religious works” could be placed in neither group.
In addition, I classified a number of other titles in various smaller groups, including “Danish classics,” “Foreign classics,” “Poems” and
“Plays.” Another large group, comprising 75 titles, was designated “Histo
ry, historic novels, folk songs, memoirs, biographies and travel.” In spite of
all my attempts to classify them in some other way, I had to conclude that most of the books fell into a category that could only be described as
“Entertainment with no special ideology.” This large group contained a total of 147 titles, and, admittedly, even many of the novels by Grundtvi- gian authors, as well as the historical novels, were undoubtedly primarily read for their entertainment value. Naturally, I have no way of knowing whether former readers in Kimballton were aware, as I am, that, for exam
ple, Thyra Jensen, represented in Kimballton by her book En lille Pige Danser: en Ungdommelig Historie (A Little Girl Dances: a Youthful Story), was connected with the folk high school movement and moved in “Grundt- vigian” circles. In any case, although the citizens of Kimballton were followers of Grundtvig, they also purchased and read Inner Mission au
thors, however limited their interest in these books may have been.
Grundtvigian books were borrowed about 1,551 times, while Inner Mission books were borrowed only 116 times.
The next step was to see whether the records might reveal something about the interests of the individual borrower. Did the interests of certain borrowers, for example, lie within only one or two categories? The answer is a definite, No. The few Inner Mission books, (including those by Olfert Ricard or books published by Lohse, Bethesda or De Unges Forlag (which the reader must have known were of Inner Mission persuasion) were borrowed as regularly as other books.
Glancing over the available titles, it would appear that they merely pro
vided simple, popular entertainment. The citizens of Kimballton were farmers, and a large part of the collection would have been of interest to that group. Naturally, there were also books by some of the Danish-Ameri
can authors and ministers. (Works by the latter continue to be of interest to members of the Danish Reading Club according to the four women I spoke with.) The Club’s rules (undated, but probably from 1911) state that the Club’s purpose is “to encourage good, healthy Danish reading,” and the ideas which inspired the founding of the Club were probably similar to those prevalent in Denmark at the time. This is expressed in an article by Johannes Grønborg written in 1895 and entitled “Om Læseforeninger paa Landet” (Reading Clubs in the Country). Here he writes:
In selecting books for a Reading Club, due consideration must be given to local conditions, the spiritual views of the population and other things. Where no Reading Club has previously existed, it would be best in the first years to choose easily understood, entertaining literature, mainly short stories and historical and other novels by well- known authors, but not plays or collections of poetry. ...I will list some of the authors whose work, in my opinion, are especially appro
priate for Reading Clubs. Older literature should be represented in
the Reading Clubs with books by Ingemann, Blicher, Hauch, An
dersen, Hostrup, Etlar, Ewald, Bergsøe and all the so-called school
teacher authors, in addition to Magdalene Thoresen, Budde, Bauditz, P.R. Møller, Malling and others. There are many titles by the realis
tic authors which are not appropriate for Reading Clubs; but it will be possible to find good things for the Reading Clubs by authors such as Drachmann (stories of the sea), Schandorph and Pontoppidan, while melancholy Jacobsen and high-class Gjellerup would probably not be popular with the members of a Reading Club. ... It would be a good thing if Reading Clubs throughout the country could be strengthened and grow more quickly than in the past. Those who work to promote the progress of the common man in the areas of education and culture should not hesitate to arouse his love of poetry and the art of writing by supporting Reading Clubs. Now, in the autumn, is the time to get to work to find good, healthy reading for the long winter evenings.7 Of all the authors recommended by Johannes Grønborg, the Reading Club in Kimballton lacked only Magdalene Thoresen and Schandorph. No books by J.P. Jacobsen or Gjellerup had been purchased!