National Nordic Museum

This guide to the National Nordic Museum in Seattle starts inside a shuttered elementary school in 1979, where Swedish immigrant Marianne Forssblad decided Ballard's fading Scandinavian fishing community needed a place to keep its history. You'll hear about the fishermen and boatbuilders who built the neighborhood by hand, and how their story nearly went unrecorded before Forssblad and other Nordic immigrants took over the old schoolhouse. It follows the museum from those repurposed classrooms toward a much larger ambition for the collection.