OLE BULL: A recent story on the Huffington Post website summed up one weird fact from each of the 50 United States.

The oddball fact that was presented for Pennsylvania was this:

“Norwegian musician Ole Bull attempted for a short time in 1852 to establish a New Norway colony in Pennsylvania, which is now commonly referred to as the Ole Bull Colony. The project failed when there wasn’t enough land to till, and Bull ended up going back to performing concerts.” 

For people in Potter County, that short bit of history probably wasn’t enough to fully explain Ole Bull’s history in their area.

For the record, Ole Bull was a violinist and composer who was born in Bergen, Norway, in 1810 and died in 1870. After living in Germany and Paris, he found success — and fortune — playing concerts in Britain in the 1830s. 

Bull was, in today’s terms, a rock star.

David Castano, president of the Potter County Historical Society, explained Bull’s effort to establish New Norway like this:

“Imagine Bruce Springsteen deciding things weren’t going well for his people in New Jersey and moving them somewhere else to start over. That was pretty much what it was,” he said.

Bull visited the United States on concert tours several times and in 1852, purchased more than 11,000 acres of land for a bit more than $10,000 where he planned to establish a Norwegian colony.

He had never seen the land, but expected that it would be good for farming, David said.

Bull recruited a couple hundred settlers who had to each have a stake of about $300 to get started. They took a train from New York as far as Wellsville, N.Y., and then rode in wagons to Coudersport before arriving at their new colony in the Kettle Creek Valley.  

Bull had hired local workers to begin clearing land and build a hotel in Oleana, the center of the new colony.

Bull and the settlers soon learned, however, that there wasn’t enough land that was suitable for farming, and there were questions about the ownership of the land that was tillable. Bull’s finances were getting strained and land better suited to farming was opening up in Wisconsin and Minnesota, so most of the settlers moved on, David said.

A handful of settlers stayed, and a few artifacts of the colony remain, among them the remains of Ole Bull’s unfinished castle in Ole Bull State Park in the Susquehannock State Forest.