In the early days of the American republic diplomatic and consular relations were established with the Scandinavian countries, and there was more or less commerce between Norway, Sweden, and Denmark and the United States. This financial and commercial intercourse would naturally induce some Scandinavians to visit the United States and others to settle within our gates. The many Scandinavian names found in the old directories of New York, Philadelphia, and other eastern cities are largely to be accounted for in this manner. From the year 1820 the United States government supplies us with immigration statistics, but in these Sweden and Norway are grouped together down to the year 1868, and hence it is impossible to determine until then how many immigrants came from each country. From the year 1836 we are helped out by Norway, where the government then began to collect and prepare statistics of emigration. The father of Norwegian emigration to the United States in the nineteenth century was Kleng Peerson from near Stavanger, Norway. In the year 1821 he with a comrade, Knud Olson Eide, was sent from Norway to New York by the Society of Quakers in and near Stavanger for the purpose of making an investigation of conditions and opportunities in the United States. After a sojourn of three years in America, all that time being spent in and around New York City, they returned to Norway. Here their reports of social, political, and religious conditions in America and their description of opportunities in the new world awakened great interest, inducing a resolution on the part of many to emigrate. Lars Larsen, the man at whose house the first Quaker meeting had been held in Stavanger in 1816, at once undertook to organize a party of emigrants. Being successful in finding the number of people who were ready and willing to join him, the heads of families furnished their scanty possessions in money and purchased a sloop which had been built in the Hardanger Fjord between Stavanger and Bergen and which they loaded with a cargo of iron. For this sloop and cargo they paid the sum of $1,800. This little Norwegian _Mayflower_ of the nineteenth century received the name _Restaurationen_ (the “Restoration”) and on the day of American Independence, July 4, 1825, the brave little company of emigrants sailed out of the harbor of the ancient and grotesque city of Stavanger. The company consisted of fifty-two persons, including the two officers, chiefly from Stavanger City and Tysver Parish, north of Stavanger. They were fifty-two when they left Stavanger, but when they reached New York on the second Sunday of October (October 9) they numbered fifty-three, the wife of the leader, Larsen, having given birth to a beautiful girl baby on the second of September.