Tustin began as New Blekinge, a Swedish colony built around a railroad

The town of Tustin owes its name to a minister sent across the Atlantic to find workers. In the 1870s the Grand Rapids & Indiana Railroad was pushing track north through the pine, and it needed hands. So the company dispatched the Reverend J. P. Tustin to Sweden to recruit laborers — and to sweeten the deal, it gave away eighty acres of Osceola County land to a Swedish colony that took root here in Burdell Township.

The settlers called their new home New Blekinge, after the province of Blekinge on Sweden’s southern coast that many of them had left behind. They had good reason to leave: famine and a government that offered them little had pushed a wave of Swedes toward the American Midwest looking for land and steady work. In the woods around Tustin they found all three things at once — they built the very railroad that had recruited them, logged the surrounding forest, and worked the sawmills that turned the pine into lumber.

They also built churches almost immediately, which tells you something about who they were. St. Johannes’ Episcopal congregation organized in 1872, and on April 4, 1874, the Lutherans — most of them raised in the Church of Sweden — formed their own Swedish Evangelical Lutheran congregation. Faith came north in the same boats as the axes and the saws.

When the timber ran low, many of the newcomers drifted on to the next frontier, the way lumber towns always emptied out. But others stayed and put down roots deep enough that their descendants still live in the area. A state historical marker called “Unto a New Land,” set up in 1979 along U.S. 131, marks the spot today. The name New Blekinge faded from the maps, but it’s the reason a small Michigan village carries a Swedish minister’s last name.