Dane County Cultural Tour
Touring Stoughton
This is an accordion element with a series of buttons that open and close related content panels.
Hardanger Lace with Carol Sklaven
Carol Sklaven has lived in Stoughton all her life, and like many others in Stoughton and all over the world, she makes Hardanger lace. She makes things like dolls, pillowcases, baptizing gowns, sheets, Christmas tree ornaments, etc.
Traditionally you do Hardanger lace either white thread on white fabric (white on white) or you do ivory thread with ivory fabric (ivory on ivory). Now the traditions are being broken a little, and you can get other colors too, like red, blue, green, and a couple others.
Making Hardanger lace is a long process. The 22-count fabric used for Hardanger lace has tiny holes that you can thread the needle in and out of. These holds form a grid pattern. First you sew a pattern or outline, which will be the basic shape. Then you pull some threads out in the form of a square. You repeat this step until your ?? only an intricate pattern of fabric all around the doily. Then you carefully sew around the holes over the thread that’s left. [illustration]
–Anna
Carol makes Christmas tree ornaments and says that she plans on having an all-Hardanger tree. Stoughton is a very rich town culturally. For instance, on special holidays people could always go out with their bunads on. Some even ate lutefisk. Lutefisk is a dish that poorer people used to eat. It’s dried fish that has been cooked again and served with lots of butter. Now people eat it just to say, “I’m Norwegian-American.”
–Emily
Rosemaling and Syttende Mai Royalty
Introducing Helen and Chester Johnson, the 2001 king and queen of Stoughton’s Syttende Mai! Syttende Mai is a Norwegian holiday celebrating the birth of Norway. In Syttende Mai a lot of people wear bunads, a costume that people wear in Norway. The embroidered skirt Helen was wearing indicates waves.
The Syttende Mai king and queen spend a week going around to schools, nursing homes, and many other places around town. Something very important about the selection of Syttende Mai Royals is that the chosen ones are not chosen because of their beauty but because of what they have done for the town. A couple of good things they did were restoring the clock tower, donating land, working on the Stoughton depot, and starting the first skateboard ramp and youth center. Helen was also the mayor of Stoughton.
I am grateful for the beast,
Within it is the zest,
And the vitality of life,
And the source of spirit and strength.
Yes, very pretty, isn’t it?
That is a verse that Chester and Helen Johnson’s son rosemaled onto a plate. It was very beautiful.
Their son lives just on the outside of Stoughton, and he used to sell his art. He is now part of the Wisconsin Rosemaling Association.
–Sarah
To people of Norwegian descent around the world, Syttende Mai (which translated into English means seventeenth of May), celebrates the day when Norway gained independence from Sweden.
The Syttende Mai Festival in Stoughton claims to be the biggest outside of Norway. 40,000 people come to Stoughton for Syttende Mai fest every year. Can you imagine planning that? Beth Bauer can. She puts Syttende Mai together and makes it run smoothly. They have some old games for little kids. They have a running contest, and it’s two miles long. They have a juggler and a storyteller there. There is some Norwegian food and and a luncheon on Saturday. The whole town celebrates Norwegian. Some people that are not Norwegian still celebrate the Norwegian background.
–Martin
Every year a new Syttende Mai king and queen are selected to ride in the horse-drawn carriage. They are informed in September and have to keep it secret until January. Then they can tell.
–Jenny
Rosemaling Exhibit at the Home Savings Bank
Before…became a professional rosemaler, she came to the bank Stoughton Bank in Stoughton and did some practice. Most of it was on the doors and walls, but some on the rafters and edging on desks.
;
Most rosemaling is done on black background and looks much like Hungarian embroidery, but the work she did resembled more of a modern, yet traditional style. Her picture is hanging on the wall near the front door. There is no rosemaling around it, but she did have some of her artwork put into the picture with her.
–Zoe
Rosemaling is Norwegian rose painting.
–Jenny
Stoughton Opera House
John Vorndran, Transcription from Oral Interview: In 1982 they were going to tear this building down, and the people in town that had come here for shows, school graduations, and plays–they’d had a wonderful time, just like you coming here today and so they didn’t want to see it torn down… The restoration’s been going on for twenty years…
See those little wires underneath the seat? Know what those are for? That’s were the men put their hats. They turned them over and then slid them in there and then they didn’t have to hold their hats. They were kind of clever back then…
We had the grand reopening and it was a hundred years to the day… There aren’t very many opera houses like this left in the United States. Most of them were torn down. Not many left that are as close to the original condition as this one.
Storyteller Doug Phundheller
Doug Phundheller is a very German 73-year-old man. Not nearly as Norwegian as most others. In the 1900s there were no televisions or radios, so everybody went to the opera house in Stoughton. It was a bit like a huge movie theater to them, but with plays instead of movies. The Opera House was built in 1901, but there weren’t any fire escapes yet. But seven years later they put in a fire escape. Now this wasn’t your ordinary fire escape. This was a beam that would tip and wobble back and forth. Doug and his friends would play on it and run back and forth, trying to balance, until someone would shoo them off.
In 1954 the opera house was no longer in use. It was very messy and pigeons used it for their homes. Oscar Johnson, called “Pretty Oscar,” was hired to shoot pigeons in the opera house.
–Sarah
The lights at the opera house were gas-powered. It had an elevator where a horse was on a rope connected to a pulley in the opera house, connected to an elevator. So when the horse would walk down the alley, the elevator would go up.
Important people would sit in the box seats of the opera house. The seats below the balcony were oak. The first Civil War band played at the Opera House.
–Dylan
At the first performance they had at the opera house, Abraham Lincoln’s wife came on a horse.
–Rodrigo
In 1982 they [who?] convinced the city to tear down and restore the opera house to how it originally looked. It had been abandoned for so many years that the windows were broken and the ceiling needed to be replaced.
They got started. First they put in heating and air conditioning.
They replastered walls. One man took out all the seats by hand, unscrewing every screw (I bet his hands must have hurt.), and he put the new ones in.
The new seats, like the old ones, had wire underneath where the men used to put their hats.
It took more than 20 years to build and furnish the opera house. They spent almost a million dollars on the opera house, and the money all came from donations.
–MacKenzie
They had a grand reopening for the opera house. Important people came for the celebration. They put in modern sound systems. A gold outline on the stage is 22kt gold. The gold-colored designs on the walls were painted with stencils, then gold slabs were put on the design. [fix?] Above the state there is a large copper plate.
–Dylan
Sons of Norway
The Sons of Norway in Stoughton was originally founded almost 100 years ago. The intention was to have a place where Norwegians who newly came to America could have a place to take refuge, eat traditional Norwegian food, and tell Norwegian jokes, and invent Ole and Lena. At least so Jim told us.
Now they host a variety of events and pitch in and help run Syttende Mai. They have Norwegian summer camp where nothing American or English is allowed. No American candy, music, language, money, nothing. That has to be hard! They also help the community with service projects and things like that.
–Mark