Kleng Peerson was born on the seventeenth of May, 1782, on the estate Hesthammer in Tysvær Parish, Province of Ryfylke. In 1820 we find him in Stavanger, where William Allen, an English Quaker, was then organizing a Quaker society. In 1821 Kleng Peerson and a certain Knud Olson Eide were, as we have seen, commissioned, it appears, by the Quakers to go to America and examine the possibility of organizing a Norwegian colony there. The two explorers secured work in New York City, but Knud Eide fell ill and died not long after, and Peerson went west alone in quest of a suitable location for a colony. Just how far west he may have come on this first journey is not known. After some time he decided upon Orleans County on the shores of the Ontario as the best place to plant his colony, and in 1824 he returned to Norway. We have noted already the results of Peerson's mission. When Lars Larson's party prepared to go to America Kleng Peerson also left, but he did not take passage in _Restaurationen_. It seems that he embarked by way of Gothenburg and was in New York to receive the sloopers upon their arrival. It would be natural to suppose that Peerson did not go alone from Stavanger when he returned to America via Gothenburg in 1825. After much inquiry I have also succeeded in discovering the name of one man, who, with his family, accompanied Peerson that year. This man was Björn Björnson from Stavanger, a cousin of Kleng Peerson; he brought his wife and several children with him, but left two girl twins, born in May of that year, with a relative who then lived in Tjensvold, near Stavanger. Further facts about this family will be given in the chapter on Chicago. As Peerson seems to play no role in the founding of the Orleans County settlement, I shall leave him here. There will be occasion to speak briefly of him again later in connection with the second Norwegian settlement. I wish to add a few words here about Lars Larson, however. He and his family located in Rochester, where he became a builder of canal boats, prospered; and kept in close touch with immigrant Norwegians during the two decades of his life there. His home became a kind of Mecca for hosts of intending settlers in the New World. Larson died by accident on a canal boat in November, 1845, but his widow lived till October, 1887. They had eight children, of whom the first one, Margaret Allen, was born on the Atlantic Ocean, September second, 1825. Of her and others of Lars Larson's descendants I shall speak briefly below. We shall now return to the settlers in Orleans County, New York.