The Setting of the Runestone

The small settlement of Kensington is situated in the west-central part of Minnesota, some 23 miles from Alexandria, which is the largest local town. Minnesota, like several other north-central states of the United States, has a predominantly immigrant population largely of Scandinavian and northern Germanic ancestry. Even today, intrinsic cultural influences remain obvious, from institutional names to the specialties of the local diet [1]. Various claims have been made as to the different dates of initial occupation, but the generally accepted era is around the late 1860s [2]. Indeed, the first government survey of this particular region was made in 1866, although settlers began to move into the locality of Douglas County around 1858 when Minnesota first became a state [3]. Like many lands of the Mississippi headwaters, the prairie around Kensington is agriculturally fertile, but not every immigrant was lucky enough to secure a prime section. Some of the rolling hills are predominantly rock and stone rather than soil and are often surrounded by marshlands and overrun by stunted woods. Such land was still available in 1890 when a thirty-six-year-old immigrant of Scandinavian descent named Olof Ohman [4] decided to grub his farm from this section of Minnesota, rather than trekking west to the still open plains of the Dakota Territory.