All Things Swedish in Isanti and Kanabec Counties

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Visit a monumental Mora Horse, the Mora Klocka, the Vasaloppet ski race, and more in Isanti and Kanabec Counties.

Dala horses are wooden, horse-shaped toys that have been crafted and traded in Sweden since 1623. A painter named Stika-Erik Hansson from Mora – the Minnesotan city’s namesake – began the tradition of painting elaborate saddle designs using multiple colors on a single paintbrush in the nineteenth century. Today, Kanabec County’s Mora features The Mora Horse, a twenty-five foot tall, red dala horse made of fiberglass.

In 1994, the Dala Heritage Society built a whimsical, Swedish-style clock tower called Mora Klocka. The twenty-foot clock tower is robin’s egg blue, decorated with with red, green, and yellow rosemal painted flowers.

Each winter, Mora hosts the Vasaloppet ski race, a three thousand skier race founded in 1973. Skiers choose their courses, which range from thirteen to fifty-eight kilometers, and finish in downtown Mora’s Main Street, which is paved with snow for the occasion. Every three years, skiers participate in an International Vasaloppet Skiing Exchange with locations in Sweden, China, Japan, and Mora, USA.

Isanti County is known as the Dalarna of America, after the beautiful, forested, lakeside city in Sweden. Isanti County’s Cambridge city is home to the highest percentage of Swedish Americans of any metropolitan city in the United States. Explore archives and artifacts from the county’s first Swedish settlers at the Cambridge Lutheran Church, host of the Cambridge Swedish Festival. The church’s bi-annual Swedish Fest features food, live music, a midsummer maypole, and more.

Ha det bra!  Have fun!

Photo by Mykl Roventine from West Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States (Dala Horse) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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