Giants in the Earth Country

The farmhand who came to these fields was born on April 22, 1876, in Dønna Municipality, Norway, and in 1896 an uncle who had already emigrated sent him the ticket that brought him to Union County. He wrote Giants in the Earth in Norwegian, as two books published in Norway, and the combined English version followed in 1927. In 1926, a year before that translation, King Haakon VII made him a Knight of the Order of St. Olav. Rølvaag died at Northfield on November 5, 1931, aged fifty-five.

What the plaque says

Giants in the Earth Country Ole Edvart Rölvaag's First Home in America, 1896-1898 When the famous Norwegian-American novelist Rölvaag (1876-1931) came to America, he worked on the 200-acre farm of Severt Eidem (NE quarter, Section 12, and 40 acres, Section 1, Brule Township), two miles north of this corner. Rölvaag's first book The Third Life of Per Smevik (1912) and later novels reflect this experience. Pure Gold is set in a neighborhood like that around Elk Point, and events in the three Beret Holm novels--Giants in the Earth, Peder Victorious, and Their Fathers' God--are owing to Rölvaag's first two years in South Dakota. The Indian trail of Giants is like a trail nearby, and a hill reminiscent of the Indian hill where Beret sat is to be found a quarter mile north of the farmhouse. In the fall of 1898 Rölvaag enrolled at Augustana Academy in Canton. He returned to the Elk Point area frequently, for Eidem's wedding in September 1898 and for summer farm work. After graduation in 1901 his home was to be Northfield, Minnesota, for the rest of his life. At Augustana Rölvaag met Jennie Berdahl and in 1908 married her. At her father's house near Garretson he heard many of the stories of pioneering that made their way into Giants and his other novels. In 1978 the Nordland Heritage Foundation moved the Berdahl house to Augustana College in Sioux Falls as a memorial to Rölvaag and the Norwegian pioneers of the Sioux River Valley. Erected 1981 by the Nordland Heritage Foundation, S.D. Department of Transportation, and the S.D. State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• National Music Museum — 12 mi
  One of the great collections of musical instruments in the world, on a college campus in a prairie town, built around a band teacher's thousands of horns, fiddles and curiosities.
• Ponca State Park — 13 mi
  Oak ravines and bluffs at the downstream end of the Missouri's last unchannelized reach in Nebraska, with a three-state overlook and the river's resource and education center.
• Spirit Mound Historic Prairie — 15 mi
  A lone hill north of Vermillion that Lewis and Clark walked to on a scorching day in 1804, now one of the few places left where you can stand exactly where they stood.

More markers nearby

• St. Paul Lutheran Church — 1.0 mi
• Richland Methodist Episcopal Church — 1.9 mi
• Elk Point — 6.1 mi
• First Election in Northwestern United States — 6.2 mi