This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
In the fall of 1849, some 900 Swedish immigrants gathered in a Swedish church in Chicago to begin the trek across the Illinois prairie to Andover, the colony they intended to build in Henry County not far from Bishop Hill, the earlier Swedish religious communal settlement founded by Eric Janssen.
The first settlers to arrive late in the year had all they could do to dig wells and build a few rough Swedish longhouses to get through the winter. Early the next spring, they build a church. More and more of the 900 arrived until newcomers had to be housed in the church itself.
There were a few complaints, however. For the Swedes, this prairie colony was to be an Eden of religious freedom. Its rich soil would provide them plenty of food. Through the heat of summer, they all worked hard.
Then in midsummer, a wagon load of Norwegian immigrants stopped at Andover and also in nearby Bishop hill on their way West. Two weeks later, the first cases of cholera appeared in both communities. All summer it grew into epidemic proportions. Wood cut to build homes and finish the church had to be used instead for coffins. When even that wood gave out, the dead were buried head to foot in long trenches. Cholera was common in many immigrant communities, but nowhere was it as severe as in Andover and Bishop Hill. By September, the original 900 colonists had been reduced to 63, half of them children under the age of 15. The remaining colonists considered abandoning Andover and moving, but the epidemic passed. Andover recovered and became a thriving community.
The cause of the cholera epidemic was never discovered. The colonists had been weakened by the arduous voyage across the ocean in cramped quarters. The severe climate weakened them even further. The colonists had built their three wells 27 feet from the community outhouses without realizing that the high water table and the permeable limestone in Henry County allowed the wells to be continually contaminated. They had no idea of how cholera spread.
But the future historians of the Swedes in Andover, looking back, did find a probable cause: the only out of the ordinary event that whole first year was the visit of the wagonload of Norwegians. They did not need to look further.
Rock Island Lines is underwritten by the Illinois Humanities Council and Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, with additional funding from Humanities Iowa, the Iowa Arts Council, and Augustana College, Rock Island.
