A Southerner (or probably a flat-out East Coaster) moving to the Midwest is faced with many subtle cultural differences, but when said Southerner (or ECer) moves to a large city in the Midwest, the differences are not always as pronounced: grocery stores don’t sell pimento cheese, no biscuits sold at Hardee’s after 10AM, no one understands that “did you get up with (insert name)?” means on the phone, ya’ll is “cute”.  All things that could be considered minor oddities, many of which can be solved in your own kitchen or by laughing off the differences.

This weekend, I had the pleasure of visiting small town Wisconsin at its finest: Stoughton, Wisconsin, population 12,611, with native Stoughtoner and my co-worker and friend Lucas as my guide.

What makes Stoughton so special besides the fact that its downtown seems to be thriving? Not to spoil the answer to this rhetorical question that I intend to answer eventually, but really, despite there being a festival, nary a store window had a “for lease” sign.  In such a small town, every building was occupied with book stores, cafes, bars, restaurants, a movie theater, children’s stores, a cheese store– it was impressive!

Our reason for venturing to Stoughton was to check out its Syttende Mai festival.  Syttende Mai is the Norwegian Constitution Day, and Stoughton has something uncommon to most small towns I have visited in the colonially-muddled cities of the East Coast (from which I am proud to come, we have our own history, don’t get me wrong!): a strong Norwegian heritage in almost every single resident.

Check out that mural over their river! In my hometown, I think we are all British.  If we do stuff like that, we just put it in some old English script, or what we think is how the English colonists spelled things.  But then that’s even weird.  And some of us are a little German, French, or other heritage, but even my German ancestor fought in the Civil War. Been here a long time, we have.

The first thing we saw was the “Sonner Av Norge” house, which seemed to be something like  a Moose Lodge but for Norwegian-heritage Stoughtonites.

We continued to walk down the main street, where we stopped and ate a ton of delicious, deep-fried cheese curds. Notice that the word cheese curds is a different color; it is a link. Cheese curds are hard to explain, please read if you are curious!

With Lucas as our guide, we made our way to the middle school where the Norwegian dancers (this is a club you can join if you go to high school in Stoughton) were performing traditional dance.  It was really neat, but I couldn’t get a good picture. This is the only photo I stole from online, and I got it here.

At some point, we wandered into the “Nordic Nook”, a local store for Scandinavian gifts and apparel. This was not thrown up for the festival, this store is here year-round.  You can buy all the Uff Da stuff you ever wanted here. Uff Da means, roughly, “ahhh”, or “overwhelming!”.  It is of Norwegian origin and is used frequently by Wisconsinites of Norwegian heritage.

After watching the dancers for a bit, we made our way back down Main Street, where we again saw several women rushing by in traditional Norwegian outfits. I became determined to get my photo taken with one, but was at the same time terrified of asking.  As we neared Lucas’ car, I ducked into the Sonner av Norge house to see if I could find a nice lady who would be in a photo. To my surprise, the one nice lady led me to two more, and a man even, and they all started speaking to each other in NORWEGIAN, which turned this quaint heritage festival into a “WAIT– this is recent, you guys are from Norway!! You guys speak Norwegian!!” at which point I told them in my slow, terribly pronounced, 2nd semester Swedish that I spoke a bit of, well, Swedish.

Turns out that many of the elderly folk in Stoughton were born in Norway, and reared their children speaking Norwegian.  The older woman in the picture with me fits that bill.  The rest of them flew over from Norway the Saturday before to visit their now-American relatives and participate in the festival.  Who coulda known?