Folk Farmsteads on the Frontier: German-American Farm Buildings in Southwestern North Dakota
Anna Andrzejewski and Travis Olson
Free and open to the public, but registration is required. Email Antje Petty (apetty@wisc.edu) to receive a link.
(links will be mailed on January 27, 2021)
This talk focuses on farm buildings built by German Americans who immigrated from Russia, Hungary, and other parts of eastern Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Stark and Hettinger Counties in southwestern North Dakota. As part of several field schools and grant-funded projects, faculty and students from UW have been working with local partners since 2017 to document the history of these buildings through measured drawings, archival research, and oral histories and interviews. Previous research on German-American farmsteads in the Great Plains has focused on finding evidence of “Old World” survivals. In contrast, our work examines how “Old World” ideas mixed among and between different immigrant groups as well as how it changed over the first generations of settlement.
Anna Andrzejewski is Bradshaw Knight Professor of the Environmental Humanities and Director of the Center for Culture, History, and Environment (CHE) in the Nelson Institute at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Travis Olson is a Ph.D. student in Art History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His dissertation focuses on the materiality of Eastern European immigration and the environmental transformation of the Upper Great Plains.