In the early 1800s, a sustained period of peace, the introduction of a vaccine for smallpox and increased production of potatoes in Sweden led to a doubling of the population from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. The burden of the resulting labor surplus, and the potato famine that followed in the 1860s, hit Sweden's agrarian sector the hardest. By 1870, almost half of the farm population was landless.
Most Swedish immigrants to the United States found work on farms until the 1890s, when the decrease of homesteading and the vanishing of available frontier lands forced roughly a third of them to the cities. Some ambitious individuals had by this time founded colonies of Swedish immigrants in various locations. One instance took place in Texas, where Porter grew up. The rancher S. M. Swenson, an immigrant to Texas, where Noon Wine is set, brought over a group of Swedes to work his land in 1848, and his brother continued to bring over Swedes after the Civil War ended in 1865. By 1910, a few years after the story is set, there were as many as 4,000 Swedish Americans living in the vicinity of Austin, Texas. Here, as elsewhere, Swedish immigrants generally had little trouble getting work, for they were regarded as industrious and physically skilled.
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