Upper Settlement Rural Historic District

Set among gently rolling hills between Jenson and Rogstad Mountains, this district east of Cranfills Gap preserves a Norwegian farming settlement of the later 19th century. Sixteen major buildings stand within it, and fourteen are counted as contributing. They include Old St. Olaf's Church, a stuccoed stone building with a shingled bell tower and octagonal spire, and a series of farmhouses dating from the early 1860s to the 1910s, most from the 1870s and 1880s. Houses are built of limestone, log, and wood frame, with barns, cellars, cedar-post fences and collapsed stone walls nearby. The Bersvend and Kari Swenson farm, with its stone house, stone barn and dug-out cellar, is called the best-preserved early Norwegian farm community in the county. Several sites, such as the ruined Alfei farm, hold strong archeological potential. The landscape remains open and agricultural, and cedar telephone poles from the early 1900s line some roads. Together these features show how Norwegian pioneers lived in Texas.