Utah's Norwegian community to mark Norway's Constitution Day, 200 years of emigration

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KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Utah's Norwegian community will celebrate Norway's Constitution Day and 200 years of emigration.
• The celebration on Saturday will feature speeches, a parade, traditional music, dancing and Norwegian food.
• Constitution Day is a major holiday in Norway while 2025 marks the bicentennial of "organized immigration" from Norway to the United States.

SALT LAKE CITY — Norway marks Constitution Day on Saturday — a major holiday in the nation — and Utahns with roots in the Scandinavian country are marking the day with a celebration of their own.

Saturday's event will mark nearly 200 years of immigration from Norway to the United States, which is the focus of other commemorative events this year. The Utah 17th of May Celebration will start at 11 a.m. on Saturday at the Norway section at the International Peace Gardens at Jordan Park, 1060 S. 900 West in Salt Lake City.

Constitution Day in Norway "is Thanksgiving and New Year's and Days of '47 and everything together," said Lars Johansen, who's from Norway but now lives in Utah and serves as the royal honorary Norwegian consul. The celebration in Norway, which marks the signing of the nation's constitution on May 17, 1814, is "humongous."

In Utah, the local Norwegian community has held 17th of May Celebrations for many years. This year, though, the activities take on an added dimension as 2025 marks the 200th anniversary of "organized immigration" to the United States and Canada from Norway.

"Immigration can be healthy and good," Johansen said.

There will be speeches, a parade, traditional music and dancing and Norwegian food at Saturday's event, as well as a presentation by Johansen on the bicentennial of Norwegian immigration here.

Organized emigration from Norway dates to July 4, 1825, when a ship carrying 52 Norwegians, called Restauration, departed Norway for North America. According to the Norwegian-American, an online publication geared to the Norwegian community in the United States, a replica of the ship will set sail from Norway on July 4 this year, bound for New York City to mark the bicentennial.

"The journey will commemorate the emigrants who bravely left Norway so long ago, while symbolically raising awareness of the hardships that people today face as they search for freedom and a better life — some still risking their lives," reads a report by Norwegian-American on the plans.

Brigham Young University's Scandinavian studies program will host a symposium from Nov. 18-20, focusing on Norwegian emigration to the United States. "The focus for the BYU symposium will be the westward movement of Norwegians to the Intermountain West and beyond," reads the BYU website.

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.

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Tim Vandenack

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Tim Vandenack covers immigration, multicultural issues and Northern Utah for KSL.com. He worked several years for the Standard-Examiner in Ogden and has lived and reported in Mexico, Chile and along the U.S.-Mexico border.