14020 195th Street North
Scandia, MN, USA

Johannes Erickson House

The Johannes Erickson House is a historic log cabin in Scandia, Minnesota, United States, built in 1868 with a gambrel roof, a distinctive tradition from southern Sweden. It was moved to its current site adjacent to the Hay Lake School in 1974 to be part of a small museum complex operated by the Washington County Historical Society. The Erickson House was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976 for having local significance in the themes of architecture and exploration/settlement. It was nominated as a rare surviving example of a style brought to Minnesota by Swedish immigrants from Dalsland and Småland.

Description

The Johannes Erickson House is a small, two-story house measuring 28 by 20 feet (8.5 by 6.1 m). The walls are of hewn oak logs, covered over with plank siding. There are two rooms on each floor. The gambrel roof allows for a full-height upper story instead of the cramped loft space of most log cabins.

Access to the upper floor was originally gained by an exterior staircase. In its early days the house also had a lean-to at the rear for use as a summer kitchen.

History

The house was built in 1868 by Johannes Erickson and his 13-year-old son Alfred. In 1904 the adult Alfred Erickson built a new home for the family, and the original cabin saw use over the years as a granary, a garage, and even a playhouse. By 1974 it was no longer useful to owner Vernon Jellum, and he made plans to have it demolished or relocated. The Washington County Historical Society purchased the building and had it moved 1.5 miles (2.4 km) to its current site to form a small museum complex near a 1900 monument to the first Swedish settlers in Minnesota.

National Register of Historic Places - Johannes Erickson House

Statement of Significance:

The Johannes Erickson family emigrated from Dalsland, Sweden, to the Scandia area of Washington County, Minnesota, in 1866. The Scandia area was (and remains today) primarily Scandinavian in settlement. The Erickson Log House is a unique example of log-gambrel house construction, common in the provinces of Smaland and Dalsland in Sweden. In the Scandinavian-settled areas of Minnesota, however, extremely few examples of this type of house construction are extant.

(In that the Erickson Log House was no longer desirable v as a utility structure on the Jellum farm, plans were made for removal of the house by either re-location or demolition. Consequently, the house was moved to a new location in the immediate vicinity of the original site, which provided a more compatible environment for future restoration and preservation.)