It’s not as if I hadn’t seen it coming, but still it’s shock: Norsk Høstfest of Minot, North Dakota, long the largest Scandinavian festival in the US, announced today that it had closed its doors for the last time.
Since 1978, except for the Covid hiatus, people streamed to Minot (one of the remotest cities in America) every fall for an astonishing combination of Scandinavian crafts, food, and culture, along with stadium shows featuring big-name entertainment (largely, but not exclusively, country and western music). The crowds were huge in its heyday, with every room in town booked. Thousands of folks rolled in to camp in RVs, and day tour buses arrived in convoys. If you had a hankering to see people in cowboy hats and Norwegian sweaters, Høstfest was the place to go.
Our Viking Age Club & Society was part of it from very early on (I myself only started attending around the turn of the millennium, but I guess I was involved in about half the festival’s history). Ron, one of our old members, attended for 25 straight years and had all kinds of stories to tell about the celebrities he’d met, back when the entertainers used to mingle more freely with the public. He taught Victor Borge to make butted mail. He slung one of the Mandrell sisters over his shoulder and carried her into his tent (for a photo op). He had beers (nothing more, he insisted) with Willie Nelson in his trailer.
My chief memories are of the years we spent in what they called “Copenhagen Hall,” where the Oak Ridge Boys did three concerts a day right around the corner. We Vikings used to do three combat shows a day (four on Saturday). Just getting in and out of my armor got to be exhausting, after a while, as I got older.
They put us up in homes with local families, and we all made long-lasting friendships. I’ll miss those people.
I’ll even kind of miss the 9-hour drive to northern North Dakota. Other group members mostly took the dogleg route through Bismarck, which added an hour, but I followed my GPS on a diagonal path that took me through towns most people have never heard of.
It was a good place sell my books. I’ve lost three festivals in the last couple years. That will hurt. Fortunately, a new one started last year, and another is coming this spring.
But there’ll never be another Høstfest. Quirky, very American, fueled by community pride and voluntarism, two commodities in increasingly short supply these days.
Though I had no sense of it ( should search the site for older posts!), I am saddened by this.
Following the link, I read of the Scandinavian Heritage Park – but got no response using that as a search-term, here. Could you tell us something about it, sometime?
It’s a nice urban park in downtown Minot, adjacent to the Chamber of Commerce. Features a replica stave church (very impressive) and a “stabbur” (a storehouse built on a sort of pedestal). Also, as I recall, a statue of Sondre Norheim, the Norwegian-American who invented modern downhill skiing.
Thank you! It belatedly occurred to me to see if Wikipedia might have an article – and, it does – including a couple photos of that splendid stave church! Also a link to the Scandinavian Heritage Association with more photos – and lots of its own links I have not yet tried.
Both a consolation – and somehow making the end of the Høstfest seem even sadder, since fest and park will no longer be complementary and mutually enhancing.