Stockholm, WI Post Office

When Swedish immigrants from Värmland arrived at Lake Pepin’s shores in 1854, they named their new village Stockholm, after their homeland’s capital. The irony: by 1900, Chicago held more Swedish residents than any city in the world except the original Stockholm, making Wisconsin’s Stockholm, population 78, one of the smallest places on earth to share a name with one of history’s most improbable Swedish population centers.

The immigrants themselves left little room for romance in their reasoning. More than 200 of them came from Bjurtjärn, an impoverished parish near Karlskoga in Värmland, and settled at the foot of the Mississippi bluffs because the land and the fishing were there, not because it resembled home. Stockholm’s early economy ran on lake clams, harvested for the button trade until twenty years of dredging left nothing to harvest, and on ice, cut from the Mississippi and shipped out once the railroad arrived. Sweden’s capital, meanwhile, kept growing steadily on the other side of the Atlantic, apparently untroubled by the competition.