Norway Lutheran Church
Gifts given to the church on Sept 29, 2009.
When hard times came to Norway in the 1880's, many of Telemark's most talented skiers emigrated to America, "the golden land in the west". Among them was Sondre Norheim, who took his family to Minnesota in 1884 and settled at Oslo, Marshall County, in the Red River Valley. Four years later he homesteaded in what is now North Dakota. But the Norheims found hard times in America, too; when Sondre died in 1897, he had not been able to prove up his land claim. His family moved away, and his grave in a churchyard near Denbigh remained unmarked until the Norwegian Society for the Promotion of Skiing and the State Historical Society of North Dakota placed a monument there one the 150th anniversary of his birth.