Hallstrom Home for the Holidays

The Hallstrom House stands as a memorial to a resourceful and hard-working pioneer family. Hallstrom, the youngest of 10 children, had only a sixth-grade education when he dropped out of school and went to work on the family farm. He learned how to grow vegetables and flowers at a young age, Smith said.

After immigrating to the United States, he worked in Chicago and St. Paul, but then, a few years into the 20th century, he was drawn to Florida by the lure of opportunity. Henry Flagler had extended the Florida East Coast Railway down the peninsula, which enabled growers to ship produce to northern markets faster than by steamboat. In 1904, Hallstrom bought land in the Viking settlement near Indrio Road in St. Lucie County for a pineapple plantation. When his wife, Emely, died a few years later, he sold the land and moved north to the Oslo community of Norwegian settlers in what is now Indian River County. There, in 1908, he planted 40 acres of pineapples on the sandy Florida ridge 100 yards west of the railroad tracks. He later planted citrus, and he built the farmhouse, using bricks from Georgia and the help of local craftsmen, many of whom were, like him, Scandinavian immigrants. The house was completed in 1918.

Hallstrom, a past president of the Indian River Producers Association of Vero Beach and a director of the St. Lucie County Bank in Fort Pierce, lived in the house with his daughter, Ruth, until his death in 1966 at the age of 96. Ruth Hallstrom, who taught at a one-room school on Orchid Island for one year and later managed her father’s citrus business and served as his caregiver, lived in it until her death at 95 in 1999. She bequeathed the house and five acres to the historical society.
Axel Hallstrom seemingly kept records of every aspect of his life and businesses. When the historical society took over the house, members found — in nearly every room as well as the third floor attic — documents stacked up in file cabinets, hat boxes, packing boxes, bookcases and old-fashioned satchels, from typed bills and receipts to journals and handwritten letters. Smith saw an invoice from a Fort Pierce doctor to a Hallstrom relative that was dated in the late 1940s.

“The bill said if they paid by the 10th, they’d get 100 S&H Green stamps!” Smith said.

Some of the correspondence between Axel and Ruth Hallstrom and relatives in Sweden was written in Swedish, so the historical society has brought in a number of people who know the language to translate. Students from Indian River State College are converting the material to a digital format. Now, Smith is looking for more volunteer docents to give tours of the house so that it can be open more than three days a week (Wednesday, Thursday and Friday). He also hopes to find someone who knows “Old Swedish,” the language that grew out of a Norse dialect in the Middle Ages. Gradually, it was supplanted by the less complex “New Swedish,” but hundreds of years later, at the dawn of the 20th century, some of the Hallstroms’ relatives and associates still corresponded in “Old Swedish.”

Ruth Hallstrom was born in the United States in 1904. When her mother was dying four years later in St. Lucie County, Axel promised he would take the girl to Sweden to meet her relatives.

“They maintained a steady correspondence over the years,” Smith said. “The Swedish bond was very strong with Ruth.”

Ruth went to finishing school in Sweden after graduating from Fort Pierce High School in 1924. She would be delighted to see Swedish customs continue at the house her father built, Smith said.

“She was very much a traditionalist,” he said. “She liked the old ways.”