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If you aren’t looking, you might miss the dozens of gnomes hiding in the yards, doorways and windows of Peterson.
“They aren’t mean. They’re not a troll, but they’re hard to spot,” said Becky Stocker. “[Gnomes] are very real and active members of the community in Norway.”
Stocker is a long-time resident and a bit of a gnome expert (some might call her a ‘gnome-it-all’) after plotting to bring Peterson its first gnomes in 2018. These usually tiny, mischievous creatures that feature prominently in Norwegian folklore are tucked away in yards, on front stoops, and in windows — a nod to the town’s Norwegian heritage.
Peterson was founded by Norwegian immigrants in the mid-1800s. The town, which boasts 227 residents today, is burrowed in the hills of Minnesota’s driftless region, surrounded by corn fields and nestled in between the Root River and its popular biking trail.
After Fillmore County opened up homesteading, settlers started arriving, including Cheryl Eaton’s grandfather.
She grew up here and said that the community’s Scandinavian heritage runs strong.
“It’s more Norwegian,” said Eaton, who now volunteers at the Peterson Museum. “There’s been a few Swedes here, but not very many. And then the man who ran the fish farm — that was the only Catholic family in town [when I was a kid.]”
Eaton said that the gnomes are just one way Peterson celebrates its heritage. Gammel Dag Days is Peterson’s annual Scandinavian midsummer festival. Placards around town detail how the community benefited from the railways and how settlers lived on the land.
And more recently, there are the gnomes.
How do you lose a giant gnome?
Stocker said the idea for making gnomes the town mascots started out on a whim. Her friend had seen a huge gnome for sale in nearby Rochester. It was too expensive, so they found a cheaper one online.
But the giant gnome they ordered never arrived.
“How do you lose an eight and a half foot gnome? The company [said] they’d send us another one right away, because the gnome was lost,” recounted Stocker. “On the day of delivery here, they unloaded two gnomes for us, which is very fitting because gnomes always come as twins.”
Thus, Gus and Gunner were born.
“Those are our two gnomes, and they’ve kind of been our mascots ever since,” she said.
When the twins arrived the town got gnome fever, said City Administrator Chris Grindland.
“You drive through town, and all of a sudden you see all these new gnomes just popping up in people's yards. And the next thing you know, it’s all over the place,” he said. “It just happened organically.”
One of the giant twins stands outside the Peterson Museum, the other on the old rail line that’s now the Root River State Trail. He greets bikers, walkers and runners. But no one in town can tell which one is Gus and which is Gunner.
And since the gnome twins arrived in Peterson, they’ve acquired a lot of friends. Gnome flags hang from lampposts downtown. There’s life sized cutouts of gnomes for pictures. A gnome scavenger hunt helps people find hidden gnomes in people’s yards and in their windows.
Standing next to a historical marker at the entrance to town, Grindland said the gnomes are just one way Peterson tries to stand out at a time when small towns are often overlooked.
“It just preserves the history of the town. You have people coming through on the bike trail [and they think] just another little, small town. This gives them a glimpse into our history and to see how the town was started, and, you know what it's been through,” he said.
Grindland admitted he doesn’t know how many gnomes are in Peterson. But it's fair to say there are scores of them.
“Definitely we are the gnome capital of Minnesota,” he said. “For sure.”
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