VSlkommen till Hutto, en Svensk samhSliet (Welcome to Hutto, a Swedish community)

VSlkommen till Hutto, en Svensk samhSliet (Welcome to Hutto, a Swedish community)

Written by Karen R. Thompson Monday, 07 January 2008

As the population of Hutto increases, it is hard to believe that a century ago this community was 70 percent Swedish families. If you went shopping downtown in 1908, most of the customers would be speaking Swedish. If the business was not Swedish owned, the owners employed Swedes.

Andrew J. Franzen’s journey was typical of 19th century Swedish immigrants. He was born in the province of Smaland in March 1887. He came to Taylor to work on a farm in 1910 and married Signie Johnson in 1913.

Andrew and Signie were the parents of 10 children: Anton, Walden, Margaret, Evelyn, twins Dorothy and Doris, Eloise, Vera Ann, Bertha Mae and Eric Marvin. The family belonged to the Hutto Methodist Church, where services were conducted in Swedish until 1940.

The more than 300-acre Franzen farm always had work to be done such as growing corn, maize and cotton. The Franzens also sold milk in Hutto. As most farm families did, they charged to accounts in stores and paid the account when the crops came in.

In Hutto, the Johnson Brothers mercantile store was also a bank, meat market and hardware store. Both the owners and clerks were Swedish, and customers had no trouble conducting business in their native language. That was also true for the Blomquist Store at Second and Main streets in Taylor where Emilee Olander was a fine dressmaker.

The farm had four tennent houses, but when cotton needed picking, the entire family, including the seven girls, worked in the fields. Signie spent all morning cooking, and Margaret remembers that lunch after a morning of picking cotton was especially “wonderful.”

Father always paid the children for their efforts picking cotton. Sometime near 1930, the Franzen children asked their father to buy them a car to drive to school instead of giving each of them money. So in 1930, Mr. Franzen purchased a used 1924 Ford for $100. The kids drove it to school in Hutto, where all 10 children graduated from high school.

Very few of the Swedish children spoke English before starting school. Margaret remembers starting school in 1925 and crying every day because she did not speak English. Her teacher sent her to sit with her older brother in the fourth grade for a week until she could begin to catch on. The way the adults learned English was from the school books the children brought home. Every night the entire Franzen family would gather to study.