Scandinavian Choirs

One third of the means for the 567 emigrants leaving Scandinavia in 1869 was sent from Utah. Work on the approaching railroad proved a boon because it was the one type of labor for which cash was paid, cash that could be sent to waiting relatives in the old country. Scandinavians in Utah contributed twenty-five cents a month to a missionary fund, and they organized local emigrant aid societies whose contributions showed up on the emigration ledgers in Copenhagen as the Moroni Fund, the Ephraim Fund, the Provo Fund. The renowned Scandinavian Choir in Salt Lake City held benefit concerts. In Ephraim, Sarah Ann Peterson of the Women's Relief Society urged her sisters to donate all Sunday eggs to the fund, and other settlements followed. In 1872, to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the arrival of the Mormons in the Great Salt Lake Valley, friends and relatives in Utah sent $10,000 to Scandinavia. In 1883 they sent $30,000 more to Sweden alone, enabling so many to emigrate that the mission could hardly function.