Bjorn Amundson Stonedalen

Finally I shall add the names of Bjorn A. Stondall and Bjorn Stevens Hustvedt, two of Cottage Grove's well known early pioneers, who emigrated in 1843 and stopped through the winter in Muskego ; thence they came to Koshkonong, locating in Cottage Grove in the spring of 1844. 259 Bjorn Stondal was from Vinje, in Telemarken, being born on the farm NaBstestu in Bograend in 1823. He sailed on the ship Vinterflid from Porsgrund in the spring of 1843, as he relates. 260 They were eleven weeks on the ocean before reaching New York. The objective point was Milwaukee and the Muskego settlement; here they stopped during the winter with an American by the name of Putnam, seven persons in a hut that was fourteen feet long and ten feet wide. In the spring of 1844 he walked west to Koshkonong, where he de- cided to buy eighty acres of land in section thirty- two in southern Cottage Grove, and begin the occu- pation of a farmer. Four years later he married Gunhild Bergland. Bjorn Stondal died in April, 1906, at the age of eighty-three, survived by his wife and nine children.