This summer we took a road trip around in Värmland and Dalsland. This is a country of lakes, rivers, and canals slicing through the forest, but not many large cities (Karlstad excepted). Prototypical Swedish wooded countryside.
As we drove around, it was quite striking to see the same names of famous people come up over and over again. It seemed every little small town had something to do with a small cast of characters.
We had the poet Nils Ferlin, especially around his hometown of Filipstad. And the great Gustaf Fröding, another poet active a generation before Ferlin. Fröding had at least three statues of him just in Karlstad, in addition to the museum at Alster where he was born. Fröding and Ferlin can pop up anywhere.
Arguably the biggest literary star of Värmland is Selma Lagerlöf. Nobel Laureate and the first woman to join the Swedish Academy. Her family mansion and farm at Mårbacka has been preserved just like it was when she died in 1940, at the guided tours provide a fascinating insight in the world of the early 1900s. Selma’s name pops up in the area around Sunne and Mårbacka, and she also has a few monuments in Karlstad.
But the real story belongs to the Ericsson brothers, John and Nils. They were both outstanding engineers in the great era of the great engineers, the first half of the 1800s. We first encountered them when we stopped at the Långbanshyttan mining museum.
There is a huge stone dedicated to John Ericsson outside of the house where they (and their apparently even more gifted sister) were born. Since this was the 1800s, the sister never got a chance to make her mark on the world as an engineer.
John Ericsson was lauded as the inventor of the USS Monitor, and the first Monitor-style warship in the Swedish Navy was called the HMS John Ericsson.
Nils Ericsson hardly got a mention, almost like he did not matter at all. In the exhibition called MONITOR about the USS Monitor and John Ericsson, there was a bust of Nils hid underneath the stairs. It really felt like John was the cool guy who went to America and got rich and famous while Nils just stayed home and built boring things like railroads and canals. Poor Nils.
In Filipstad, the adoration of John continued. There is a small park with the guns from the Swedish monitor John Ericsson right at the edge of the water at Kyrkviken. There is park named after John Ericsson, and out in the water in Kyrkviken we found a small scale replica of the battle of Hampton Roads! If I understand correctly, this is used to stage a reenactment of the battle during the annual “John Ericsson day” that is held in Filipstad.
At least Nils got a small mention on a memorial stone to both brothers.
Filipstad also built a small island in the stream in the middle of town in the 1870s called the Monitorholmen since it was shaped in roughly the same way. Some people truly had monitor madness in the late 1800s! Being famous in America counted for a lot in the late 1800s, just like it still does. Finally, Filipstad is home to the final resting place of John Ericsson, in the shape of his mausoleum.
However, as we moved south along Lake Vänern, Nils Ericsson started to become more prominent. After all, he was the engineer responsible for the Dalslands Kanal, a major infrastructure project in the 1860s.
We took a trip on a canal boat down Dalslands Kanal from Långbron. It ended with a major triumph for Nils Ericsson. The aqueduct at Håverud was one of his masterpieces. He insisted that the aqueduct was necessary, overcoming skeptics and a hesitant canal board by threatening to resign as project manager unless it was built.
The canal was a family project – his son Werner Ericson worked with his father on the construction, apparently taking care of a lot of the on-the-ground management while Nils was responsible for the big picture and overall plans.
An informational sign at Håverud hails Nils as a technical genius. It does mention John in a single sentence, saying that his brother built trains and armored warships… but then continues to list the accomplishments of Nils.
Staying overnight in Säffle, we found another canal that Nils built. It all felt like a nice comeback from all the attention given to brother John earlier in our trip.
Note that Nils Ericson was raised to the nobility and made a Friherre (Baron) in 1854 for his services to Sweden. At that point, he also removed one “s” from his last name. Thus, he ended up as Nils Ericson, not Nils Ericsson.