Both in the cities like Chicago, Minneapolis, Rockford, and Madison, and in the more homogeneous villages of the solidly Scandinavian counties, Norwegian and Swedish merchants and tradesmen, catering to Americans as well as to persons of their own nationality, rapidly achieved success and fortune. Seven years after landing, a Swedish immigrant is reported in 1873 to have built up in Anoka, Minnesota, the largest grocery establishment in that section, doing an annual business of $100,000.[241] In the city of Minneapolis one of the largest department stores west of Chicago, and probably the greatest Scandinavian business house in the country, is that of S. E. Olson & Co., which does a yearly business of about $2,000,000, and in the height of the season employs more than 700 persons.[242] Scattered over the Northwest are scores of enterprising Scandinavian individuals and firms engaged in business as merchants, grain-dealers, contractors, etc., whose annual business passes $100,000.[243] [241] _History of the Upper Mississippi Valley_, 228. [242] Söderström, _Minneapolis Minnen_, 204; Nelson, _History of the Scandinavians_, I, 466. [243] _Ibid._, I, 504, 467; II, 160, 164, 193, 229, 233, 248, 261; Söderström, _Minneapolis Minnen_, 202, 203. The manufacturing industries in which the Swedes and Norwegians play the more active part are those closely related to agriculture and the forest--the cutting and sawing of lumber, the manufacture of furniture, and the manufacture of agricultural implements. By foresight and shrewd investments in timber lands in Wisconsin and Minnesota, a certain Norwegian immigrant accumulated nearly a million dollars; a Swedish immigrant in like manner built up the C. A. Smith Lumber Company of Minneapolis, one of the great manufacturers of the upper Mississippi Valley, with works occupying seventy acres, employing upwards of 800 men, and with branch lumber yards situated in western Minnesota and in the Dakotas.[244] [244] S. A. Quale, a Norwegian immigrant of 1869, and C. A. Smith, a Swedish immigrant of 1867. _The North_, May 21, 1890; Söderström, _Minneapolis Minnen_, 191.