Estonian Americans

The First Diaspora: The Era of Mass Migration

The first Estonian immigrants to what would become the United States may have arrived as early as 1627 in the Swedish colony along the Delaware River. However, Estonians did not begin emigrating in significant numbers until the middle of the 19th century. Although Russian Tsar Alexander I had abolished serfdom throughout Estonia by 1819, conditions for the Estonian peasantry barely improved. Emancipation occurred only gradually; peasants did not have considerable freedom of movement until more reforms occurred in the 1850s. The Baltic German aristocracy remained in control of the rural economy. Rents could be oppressive, land was difficult to obtain and famine a recurring danger. As industrialization spread and frontiers opened worldwide, the opportunity to own a bit of land or earn relatively higher wages in a factory lured more Estonians abroad.

Many first settled across Russia, especially in and around St. Petersburg. Some of these, in turn, migrated to the United States, creating farming communities across the Midwest and West. Estonian immigrants from Russia established a community near Fort Pierre in South Dakota in 1894. Another group settled in Lincoln County, Wisconsin, in 1900, founding the town of Irma. This community built the first Estonian Lutheran Church in the United States in nearby Gleason in 1914. Other rural Estonian American communities included Dickinson, North Dakota; Rose Lodge, Oregon; Moorcroft, Wyoming; and Chester, Montana.

Estonians also formed small urban communities in Boston, Detroit, Portland, Philadelphia, Seattle-Tacoma, San Francisco, and New York City. In New York City, the Reverend Hans Rebane, a pastor of the Lutheran Missouri Synod, began publishing the first Estonian-language newspaper in the United States in 1897, the Ameerika-Eesti Postimees (Estonian American Courier). The next year, the city also became home to the first Estonian American social organization, the Amerika Eesti Heategev Selts (American Estonian Beneficial Society).

A wave of political refugees arrived following the failed 1905 Revolution in Russia. By this time, nationalism, spurred in part by an imperial policy of [Page 449]Russification, and socialism had permeated all levels of Estonian society. This wave of immigrants thus tended to be more radical in their politics. In 1906, they formed an Estonian branch within the Socialist Party of America, which shortly thereafter became the independent Estonian Social-Democratic Association. They also founded the Estonian socialist newspaper Uus Urn (New World) in 1909, which continued publication into the 1970s.

It is difficult to determine the exact number of Estonian Americans in the United States before 1920. After Sweden's defeat in the Great Northern War in 1721, Estonia became part of the Russian Empire, and Estonian immigrants were thus often misidentified as “Russians.” Estimates of the number of Estonian Americans vary wildly: The 1920 U.S. Census counted 69,200, but some contemporary scholars placed the number as high 200,000.

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