STOCKHOLM, Maine — Aroostook County is the home of Maine’s original Swedish colony, but the aging population here means that fewer and fewer descendents will be around to tell their stories.
Fifty years ago, a group of teenagers got together to save many of those stories, which families had only passed down orally. Today, that same group wants to recruit a new wave of young people to interview modern elders and keep their histories alive.
In 1973, Kathy Olmstead and her then-husband Jim Swanson bought and began renovating a late 1800s-era farmhouse in Westmanland, a town founded within the original Swedish colony. A former English teacher, Olmstead felt inspired to help young people interview local elders, much like the students in Georgia who started “Foxfire,” a magazine devoted to stories of the Appalachian region’s people and history.
Olmstead and Swanson’s home became the headquarters for a similar project known as “Silver Birches.” Under the couple’s guidance, 10 high schoolers, mostly from New Sweden, Westmanland and Stockholm, visited seniors to discuss their upbringing and tradition.
“We learned how to tell people, ‘You have an interesting story,’ and how to take pride in publishing [those stories],” said David Strainge of Stockholm, now 67, one of the original Silver Birches members.
The group self-published three books in 1975, 1976 and 1981 containing stories about residents such as “old-time mail carrier” Herman Anderson, Alma Peterson, who weaved clothes with a homemade loom, Minnie Monson, a retired teacher who snowshoed or skied to school every day and Lawrence Gunnerson, one of the last men to work as a log hauler in Stockholm.
The Silver Birches recently self-published a 2024 edition that includes all stories from the first three collections and newly written recollections from founding members.
Strainge, who still lives in Stockholm today, got the group’s name from local man Johnny Johansson, who spoke about a worm that killed the silver birches he used to make wooden skis.
“We are trying to find the remnants of the ‘silver birches’ of our community’s heritage and keep them from being completely lost,” wrote a 17-year-old Strainge in the introduction to the 1975 “Silver Birches” collection.
In future editions, the list of young writers grew to include many of the founding members’ siblings, including Strainge’s younger brother, Colin Strainge, who now lives in Albany, New York.
Colin Strainge said he is especially proud of editing a story that he and David’s grandfather, Fritz Anderson, wrote about working on a train hauling potato crops downstate, which appeared in the 1981 “Silver Birches.”
The younger Strainge was one of only a few Silver Birches members who pursued a career in journalism, before later becoming a social studies teacher. But it matters more to him that he and fellow writers helped preserve stories that might have died with their original tellers.
“It opened my eyes to how older people had things that were worth listening to and telling,” Colin Strainge said. “If we can engage young people today, hopefully we won’t have to wait 50 years for the next Silver Birches.”
Thanks to Emma Hixon, a 22-year-old Westmanland native, a new generation of young people could soon pick up where the original Silver Birches left off.
Hixon grew up in the same farmhouse that Olmstead, now a Caribou resident, and Swanson, now in Wisconsin, restored. It is the same farmhouse that Hixon’s great-great-great grandparents, Axel and Emma Wedverg, settled after immigrating from Sweden in the 1870s.
Hixon helped organize the 50th anniversary of the original Silver Birches, held last Friday at the Stockholm Museum.
Along with the original group, Hixon is spearheading efforts to recruit young writers. Though she will begin a teaching career in Fryeburg this fall, she plans to return to Aroostook every summer to help the next Silver Birches.
“It’s important to help the younger generation know that they can do this. They can build connections with their neighbors and learn how life used to be,” Hixon said. “It’s how we find the character of the towns we live in.”
Hixon may have found her first recruits in the four Olson sisters from Hamlin, who attended the Friday reunion: twins Mallory and Brooke, 15, Clara, 14, and Tatum, 12.
The sisters eagerly chatted with older Silver Birches members and collected autographs on copies of the group’s new book. They also watched as Hixon interviewed West Gardiner resident Janet Anderson Cotta, whose family is from New Sweden.
“It would be really cool if we could collect all these stories,” Mallory Olson said.
