Late in the sixteenth century, when Sweden invited a number of Finns to open the way for development in thinly inhabited wilderness districts, a particularly energetic group of semi-nomads known as axe-wielders swarmed over the land, disregarding property lines, throwing together hunter's shanties, slaughtering bear, moose, and deer for food and hides, and raising cabins of round logs roofed with boards held down by the weight of poles and cross pieces. They loosed hogs to feed in the coniferous forests and tore through the timber, torching downed trees and sowing rye among the stumps, using the grain to make spirits, eventually slashing and burning their way from the Baltic Sea to the Norwegian border.
In the 1640s this cabin-dwelling, hog-killing, liquor-distilling society came ashore in North America at New Sweden on the Delaware—mainly through Fort Christina (Wilmington, Del.), named for Sweden's child queen who commissioned Dutchman Peter Minuit to found a colony in the New World—a place at last where Sweden could dump its Finnish problem and at the same time make imperial use of the agressive pioneering methods that got the Finns into trouble in the first place. From Fort Christina the axe-weilders spread north to dominate what became Pennsylvania's Chester Township, and crossed the river to the land between the Delaware and Salem River in New Jersey.
Near the kills and rivers they and their Swedish neighbors built low, one-room cabins of crisscrossed tree trunks locked together with distinctive corner notches. Without suitable moss, they sealed spaces between the logs with mud, and closed window holes with sliding shutters. In winter they slept under bear and wolf skins. When the garments they arrived in disintegrated they made waistcoats and breeches from elk and deer skins, and flapped caps of skin or fur, and replaced worn out shoes with a type of moccasin called kippaka.
The local Lenape (Delaware) Indians called the Scandinavians "brothers" because they bought only enough land to live on. "There was no agriculture," wrote Israel Acrelius in 1750, "or no more than was required by absolute necessity." The "land was superabundant, the inhabitants few, and the government not strict." At first they had no horses or beasts of burden. The rivers flowing down to the Bay were their highways into the country. And although the Delaware Indians moved farther inland it was their "custom [after they had planted their maize] to come forth in great numbers to visit the Swedes and trade with them."
Cordial relations with natives naturally led to cultural exchange. Swedes and Finns, Acrelius said, became so "acquainted with the [Delaware] language" that "there are still some of the older ones who express themselves quite well in it." Old settlers who remeniced to Peter Kalm in 1747 went even farther, saying that, with "no other people to associate with than the native Indians," the settlers "soon began to differ in their actions and manners from the Europeans and old Swedes and began to resemble the Indians. At the arrival of the English," he said, "the Swedes to a large extent were not much better than savages."
As late as 1735 the Pennsylvania Gazette described a burglary suspect from Maryland's Eastern Shore as "a tall Fellow, of a Swedish swarthy Complexion, his fore part of his Head shav'd, and the Remainder long brown Hair." In addition to "a light-coloured Great Coat with Brass Buttons, [and] a blue strait Coat with broad white mettal Buttons, [he wore] a Pair of red Indian Leggins."
When the Quakers arrived in 1682 they found the Swedes around Wiccacoa (Philadelphia) paddling and poling dugout canoes to a log church equiped with "loopholes" instead of "window lights, "bringing firearms ... to defend themselves against the Iroquois who were also enemies of the local Lenape Indians. But the Scandinavians used the guns mostly to kill deer and elk they might see on their way to and from church. When the English came in 1664 the local Indians found out just how different the Swedes and Finns were from other white men. The Indians "looked upon the [English] as another race of people."
An old Dutchman who had married a Swede told naturalist Peter Kalm that "Penn took much land away from the Swedes and Dutch who lived near Philadelphia and gave it to the Quakers under the pretext that the Swedes had more than they needed and that otherwise it would lie waste and uncultivated."
The Dutch captured Fort Christina (Wilmington, Del.) in 1655. However, the new governor Peter Stuyvesant saw no reason to interfere with settlers who succeeded where the Dutch failed, who not only survived in the wilderness but thrived on it. And Finns continued to come voluntarily from Sweden, lured by endless forest and abundant game. In 1693, eleven years after the English overran the country, Swedes and Finns, in a petition to Sweden for bibles and other religious texts, informed potential colonists that, not only was the land rich, "there is here also a great abundance of all kinds of wild animals, birds and fish."
The colony passed into British hands in 1664 as spoils of the Dutch surrender of New Netherlands, and for eighteen years little changed. But when the Quakers came in 1682 they lusted after the Swedes' land on the Delaware, so William Penn tried to lure the Swedes to the interior with ten thousand acres on Manatawny Creek "sixty miles higher up in the country ... under the pretext that they might there have more room, and live together." The Finns and Swedes were practically Indians; let them be the Indians' neighbors. When not all of the Swedes went for the carrot Penn applied a stick.
Like Native Americans, Finns and Swedes moved beyond the reach of government: higher up the Delaware, east into New Jersey, west along the Schuylkill, and south into the "Hunting Country" at the northern end of the Chesapeake Bay. Perhaps not surprisingly, Native Americans welcomed transient woodsmen like John Hansson Steelman, who bartered for deer skins and furs with Nanticokes, Conoys, and Conestogas on Big Elk Creek in Cecil County, Md. Like most Finns he kept moving—to the Susquehanna River in 1706, and later even farther west.
In 1664 James, Duke of York "ratified" a Dutch grant of eight hundred acres on the site of Wiccacoa to Sven Gunnarson and his children, Olof, Anders, and Sven, known as the "Svenssoner (Svensons, sons of Sven or Swen)," whose name was later anglicized to Swanson. One of them lived in a log house above the river where he had a landing for boats and canoes near a grove of large sycamores. Unfortunately for the Swansons, William Penn selected the forest surrounding their homes as the site for Philadelphia. He had their title extinguished, and compensated them with double the acerage four miles away on the Schulkill. But William Penn's son, Thomas, who Peter Kalm says was "the meanest and stingiest of men ... had [their new grant] surveyed three or four times, and each time he cut off a slice from it."
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| Diamond notching—formed when the bottom ends of v-notched logs were trimmed to create a diamond shape—is found most frequently in west central North Carolina, but has also been found in western Pennsylvania and the Virginia Piedmont. This distinctively Scandinavian technique migrated south with Finns and Swedes and those who were influenced by them. |
The original Swanson homes in Philadelphia slowly disintegrated until the British turned the logs of the last one into firewood during the Revolution. By then the Penns' high-handedness had driven the Swanson descendants out of Pennsylvania. Some went to North Carolina where, at the age of seventeen, Edward Swanson of Wake County, N.C. battled Sots Highlanders and Loyalists at Moore's Creek in 1776.
In October 1778, however, Edward Swanson turned his back on the killing fields and made for the frontier of Holston River to see former Wake County neighbor James Robertson about settling on Cumberland River. From Big Creek of Holston Robertson, Swanson, and ten others crossed the Cumberland Plateau by foot and by dugout canoe until they came to French Lick (Nashville, Tenn.). Swanson and a few of the single men remained through spring and summer to tend the corn they planted. The rest left with the promise to return in the fall with their families.
The buffalo overran the corn. The men returned to the settlements. But when they came back, they came to stay. Swanson would remain in Middle Tennsessee until he died in 1840. He would be wounded by the Cherokee at French Lick in 1781, would be married to Mary Carvin, the widow of Ned Carvin who wasn't as lucky, and would settle on the West Fork of Harpeth River, twenty miles south of Nashville when Nashville was still unsafe. But Swanson wasn't the only Scandinavian to seek land beyond the frontier, although the others can't always be identified as Scandinavian.
Anglicized names and intermarriage with British colonists make Finns and Swedes difficult to identify in colonial records; they were nothing if not adaptable. In 1641 the Crown transported Pehr Larsson, a Finn, to New Sweden for burning the forest to clear land. He took the name Kock (or Cock) because he was a cook on the immigrant ship Charitas. As a bond slave he spent several years hoeing tobacco on the Schuylkill, was freed, later married, and became such an ardent partisan of the British that he helped quell an insurrection of Swedes, knifing the hand of the ringleader who tried to force open the door of the room in which he was trapped. Cock died in 1688, and by 1693 forty-seven male descendants bore his adopted surname. About the year 1740 his grandson Isaac settled on Patterson's Creek in the mountains of what is now West Virginia where he was known to Colonel George Washington as Friend Isaac Cockes.
Shortly thereafter two unrelated families with similar names showed up in southwest Virginia: the Coxes of Pennsylvania, who settled on Smith River in Patrick County, and the Cocks who settled in Bedford County. John Cox of Smith River was a longhunter who prior to 1763 moved to Reed Creek near Fort Chiswell, and in 1765 to Peach Bottom Creek west of New River. During the Revolution there was a John Cock living east of New River on Crooked Creek. He had been born in Bedford County, and in 1781 he served two months in the militia company of Captain John Cox the longhunter. Cock, who survived being tomahawked on Clinch River, was careful in his pension application for Revolutionary veterans to draw a distinction between his name, Cock, and his captain's, Cox.
The Bedford family also included Charles Cock—from "infancy accustomed to the woods"—who during the Revolution lived on Cripple Creek in present Wythe County and served as a captain of spies patrolling in Powell's Valley. He was "a rough back woodsman, a good hunter and Indian fighter [who, although he] had a great deal of common sense [was] destitute of the knowledge of letters." He nevertheless won election to the Virginia Assembly. And when time came for the delegates to "sign their names to the role," his aquaintence and fellow legislator General Joseph Martin went with him, signed his own name and told Cock, "as I have the pen in my hand, I will sign your name."
Whether or not these Cocks were anglicized Finns, it's indisputable that in the 1740s Finns and Swedes were moving south and west with their English and Irish neighbors. George Robinson with his brothers, David and Joseph Robinson, and his brothers-in-law, Bryan McDonald and William Graham, moved from Mill Creek Hundred on the Delaware to Buffalo (now Tinker) Creek in southwestern Virginia. Nothing in the records indicates clan patriarch George Robinson was anything but an Irishman; but his daughter Mary Robinson McDonald told her descendants that, while her husband's ancestors were from Scotland and Ireland, her own Robinson ancestors were from Sweden. In 1749 Moravian missionary Bernhardt Schnell visited the mill of Justice "Robeson" on Buffalo Creek, perhaps giving in his diary the correct spelling of the name.
On June 17, 1742 Andrew Campbell of Opequon Creek, twenty-five miles north of Winchester in the Virginia Valley, advertised in the Pennsylvania Gazette for the return of his servant "Stephen Holtstyn, aged about 33, tall and slender, swarthy complexion" who made off with "a gray Horse [and] a Gun." He was almost certainly a Finn, a descendent of the Holstens who Peter Kalm says arrived in America at Fort Christina in the seventeenth century. He may have been one of the Stephen Holstons who lived above the falls of the Schuylkill in early 1700s. Shortly after his escape, a Stephen Holston showed up on the head spring of the middle fork of Indian River, twenty miles west of his nearest neighbor on Reed Creek.
In 1748 the river fed by the spring where Holston settled was known as Holston's River. But by then Holston had sold his land and hillside cabin to James Davis and, with some neighbors, made dugout canoes and descended the Holston and the Tennessee to hunt in the western country. After exploring the Mississippi to Natchez and back, he settled on Little Saluda River in South Carolina where forty Cherokees ransacked his double log house in 1753 and frightened his wife who escaped through a window with her baby. Here we lose his track. He probably moved west, perhaps into Tennessee, perhaps all the way to the Mississippi where, before the Louisiana Purchase, Holstons were living on Sicily Island, a few miles west of Natchez, Miss.
Some time before his western migration Stephen may have stopped briefly in Bedford County, Va. where his brother Henry had settled, and where the Shawnee captured his nephew, also named Stephen, in 1757. But there is no conclusive evidence that old Stephen ever lived there.
Young Stephen was married to Lucy Jane Looney, a neighbor to the Henry Holston family on Craig's Creek, west of the Blue Ridge where Holston, and Adam and Peter Looney settled before 1754. After the outbreak of the French War Henry had moved his family east of the Blue Ridge, ony to discover by his son's capture that he hadn't outrun danger. Young Stephen Holston returned from captivity to serve against the Shawnee in 1774, the Cherokee in 1776, and against the British at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse in 1781.
In Bedford the Holstons were neighbors to the Vardemans, who may traveled south with the Holstons when they moved from Pennsylvania. John Vardeman arrived on the Delaware from Sweden in 1725. He was seven when his father brought him across the ocean into the fertile mix of Scaninavian, British, Irish, and German folkways as it began its march toward the Mississippi. He married Elizabeth Morgan either before or after settling in present Newberry County, S.C., only a short distance from Stephen Holston's Saluda cabin. And like Henry Holston and the Cocks, he settled in Bedford County, where an aged kinsman, William Vardeman, pursuing Cherokee horse thieves on Staunton River in 1758, flung up his "Elder stick" to fend off a tomahawk flying at his head. John Vardeman moved in 1767 to Reed Creek twelve miles west of Fort Chiswell. In 1775 he was one of the axmen who helped Boone cut a pack-horse trail through Cumberland Gap, after which he settled on Maiden Spring fork of Clinch River. In 1779 he moved to Crab Orchard, Ky. and died finally in 1827—at the age of 109—in his son's Missouri home. His eldest son William settled in the Natchez country near descendents of the Holstons and Looneys.
