Road Trip - Day 31

Today begins a new era in our journey. We have visited and imposed on friends and family most of the first 30 days. Today bigan our trip north and then west...by ourselves. We can never repay our hosts and friends along the way...they have made this an UNFORGETTABLE journey!

This morning we awoke in our motel in Manhattan, KS and heard there was a wind storm during the night. The electricity was out until about 8 in the morning. I thought  nothing of it until I went to the car. This piece of roofing flew down, not only scratched the paint, but poked a hole in the plastic below the wipers. Two other pieces  scratched the roof and the hood...good thing they had insurance at the motel. That taken care of, we had a quest to follow...find Swedeburg church.

We were told to head for Clay Center, KS and ask if anyone knew of the old church. We ran into this church just before Clay Center, drove into the parking lot and found a lady just leaving...the last one to leave. She had not heard of the church but said to follow her down the road for about 3 miles to a little berg where the all the people from the area went for lunch after church. She said some of the people there had been raised in the area and may know of the church. We followed her to the restaurant, with a line out the door waiting to get in.  I know you probable don't think I would do such a thing, but I went in looking for an older couple and asked if they ever heard of an older church, maybe called Swedeburg. He said "Oh, yeah, just go into Clay Center to HWY 15, turn right and go out about 7 miles and look for the church on the left side.

We did so, saw a white church in the distance, then a sign that said "Lutheran church", so turned down the gravel road and VIOLA!!! This had to be it!

A great little church and...

a graveyard in the back with this sign...could this actually be what we were looking for???

Nancy yelled "here it is"

 Lars Oscar Hedberg...my recollection is that he came over from Sweden. I believe there were several that settled in this area and it looks like several went to this church...mostly Swedish names...a lot of __bergs.

What a great feeling...finding the roots of family...guess Nancy and I need to go to Germany and Sweden to go any further.

This should be the way the church looked when they attended.

This is the oldl marker for the "Swedesburg" cemetery 

We drove through Clyde Nebraska...brick street and this awesome hotel,

Stopped in Concordia for lunch...2 restaurants were closed

but we found "Heavys" BBQ open...had a great lunch and Heavy told us about 2 unique places to visit in the area...

first the Orphan Train museum...the station where the orphan and abused children were dropped off for adoption...over 120,000 children were shipped this way...amazing, I never heard of this

Next he said on our way out, about a couple miles out of town we should see a tower...this is where the Concordia POW camp in WWII, where they kept German captives...did you know about this???

This is the tower that was at the entry to the camp...

Here is one of the old barracks...

a guard station at the entry

and a guard tower out in the field

Interesting, huh. We continued to Columbus, Nebraska and settled for the night. We are planning to get to  N Dakota to see the four Presidents on the mountain tomorrow...wish us luck...we're heading homeward!