In Denmark there was a surplus of population and an extreme shortage of land. Following in the wake of unsuccessful wars against Swedish expansionism which had brought about the loss of Skane, the most recent disaster to strike Denmark had been the loss of the Slesvig-Holsten duchies to the powerful Kingdom of Prussia. With Danish Slesvig under Prussian occupation many Danes were forced out, landless, into Jutland and the islands of Denmark where most farmland was part of large estates. Emigration to a place with plentiful land was an attractive option and many Danes took ship for North America, most going to the United States where they could benefit from the Homestead Act.
New Brunswick followed a similar legislative course and passed the Free Grants Act, then embarked on a program for the recruitment of desireable immigrants. Just as the British Crown had earlier recruited German Lutherans to settle the wilds of Nova Scotia, Danish Lutherans were recruited to New Brunswick. Captain S.S. Heller, a Danish sea captain then living in Canada, was sent to Denmark in April of 1872, to recruit the first settlers. By May, Capt. Heller had assembled a group of five young families and seven single men, twenty-seven persons in all. They sailed from København to Halifax aboard the Caspian, then on to the city of Saint John aboard the Empress. Finally, they were taken up the Saint John River aboard a paddle-wheel steamboat, arriving at the gravel bank where the Salmon River flows into the broader waters of the Saint John, below the great cataract of the Grand Falls. From there the intrepid pioneer Danes climbed a great hill, perhaps along the course of what is now known as the Lucy Gulch, and arrived in New Denmark. The date was June 19th, 1872, just two days short of Midsommersdag -- Midsummer's Day -- a traditional day of celebration in Denmark and throughout Scandinavia. While Midsommarsdag has fallen out of the holiday calendar in New Denmark, 19 June, Founders' Day, remains an important annual event.
Although they didn't realize it at the time, the Danes were on the wrong side of the river. The land originally promised for their settlement was the area now known as Drummond, a rather more level tract immediately to the east of the town of Grand Falls. But the government of the day, the Conservatives of Premier George E. King, reneged on that promise and set the Danes down amid fifty-six square kilometres (twenty square miles) of a trackless forest marked by steeply rolling hills and stony soils, eventually to be named New Denmark.
Situated twelve kilometres southeast of the town of Grand Falls in northwestern New Brunswick, the new Danish community was first called Hellerup after Captain Heller, then Petersen after the postmaster, Ludwig F. Petersen, and finally New Denmark. It is part of the much larger Denmark Parish of Victoria County, which follows the general line of the Salmon River stretching from Tilley in its southwest end to the Restigouche County line in the northeast.
There were two waves of Danish migration to New Denmark, the "old Danes" — gammel Danskere — beginning in the 1870s, and the "new Danes" — nye Danskere — during the 1920s. If there was some distance between the gammel Danskere and the nye Danskere it was because the newcomers were not faced with the same harsh realities as had the first immigrants. True, they still faced harsh realities but they were not considered to be on a par with the daunting prospect of transforming an unbroken expanse of virgin forest into productive farmland. Of the great influx of Danes to Canada in the 1950s, none came to New Denmark, most were urbanites looking for jobs in industry, not for the simple pleasures and back-breaking labour of the farm.
Life was indeed hard for the colonists, as it was for similar settlements elsewhere. New arrivals lived communally in the Immigrant House at first, while they became acclimated and set about clearing some small portion of their hundred-acre allotments, planting potatoes and grain among the stumps. Warm shelter was a first priority as the brittle cold winters of New Brunswick were unlike anything the settlers had known in Denmark. Food was in short supply at times and more than once the settlers were forced to dig half-rotten seed potatoes from the frozen ground just to sustain life. Disease was another problem as this was the era before most vaccines and before any antibiotics. Scarlet fever and smallpox carried away a share of the settlers — others simply gave up and left to look for better prospects. Those who survived and stayed on have left a strong community of grateful descendants.
New Denmark has always been an agricultural community. Beginning with subsistence mixed farms the Danes soon took to dairying, enough to support two local cheese factories and one for butter, along the way transforming trackless wilderness into a disciplined patchwork quilt of broad fields and pastures which today has an almost unreal postcard quality about it. Following World War I much of the agriculture of New Denmark shifted from dairying to potatoes, and by 1925 large-scale dairying was done with and the last cheese factory closed. However, this was still the age before widespread electrification and reliable refridgeration so most farms still kept a few cows to supply the families with milk. As mechanization began to take over in the 1930s field crops of potatoes dominated the local economy, alternated with cash crops of vegetables and grain. Still later the settlers' small family farms began giving way to large-scale farming and to agribusiness so that by the late 20th century fewer families were supported directly by farming their own land. Today the community's two greatest exports are potatoes and people who, like their great-great grandparents, are looking for economic opportunity elsewhere.
While Danish immigrants to both Canada and the United States were proverbially easy to assimilate, New Denmark largely remained a comfortable enclave of "Danishness" with a population which was for a long time sufficient to provide for marriages within their own ethnicity and faith. The Danish language, although declining, remains in use within New Denmark and other signs of "Danishness" are easily seen in the names of families and the roads they live on, the presence of two of the five Lutheran churches within the province, the Dannebrog — the Danish national flag — flying alongside the Canadian Maple Leaf throughout the community, and countless other signs of a people proud of their heritage and their society.
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