Swedish American Museum

About this audio guide

This guide to the Swedish American Museum in Chicago starts with storsvagaret, the brutal cold and drought of 1867-68 that pushed roughly sixty thousand Swedish farmers to abandon their land. It follows their descendants into this Andersonville building, from Kurt Mathisson's living-room collection in 1976 to the museum's move here in 1987. A rooftop water tower, added later as a neighborhood landmark, had its own scrape with a hard Chicago winter, coming down for repairs in 2014 before returning to the roof in 2017.