What it’s like to visit this ‘brutal’ US town TV put on the map

It’s a balmy spring day in May when I check into the Jasper Hotel in downtown Fargo, North Dakota. But apparently I’ve been lucky. The receptionist tells me that two weeks ago the city was buried under a metre of snow and next month it’ll be over 35 degrees (celsius) and hair-ruinously humid. Clearly, you’d need a certain kind of stoic resilience to live year-round in a place like this. Or be Scandinavian.

It turns out that around 70 per cent of the population of Fargo and its sister city, Moorhead, which is just across the Red River in Minnesota, are of Norwegian or German descent. The original settlers were lured here in the late 1800s by the promise of cheap, fertile land. As a result, the two cities have an intriguing range of Scandinavian-themed attractions.

The most notable is the Hjemkomst Centre (“hjemkomst” means homecoming in Norwegian), which houses a replica Viking ship built by Robert Asp, a local high school councillor, who had the dream of sailing it from Minnesota to his ancestors’ homeland of Norway. Sadly, he died before it was finished but his family and friends continued and successfully made the crossing in 1982.

Located in the centre’s grounds is another improbable Scandinavian doppelganger – an almost exact replica of a traditional 12th-century stave church from the Norwegian town of Vik. This project was the brainchild of Fargo local Guy Paulson, who spent almost six years building the intricately carved church out of Minnesota red pine as a tribute to his Norwegian ancestry.

Of course, both of these sites now play second fiddle to Fargo’s best-known attraction, the original woodchipper used in a grisly scene from the Coen brothers’ 1996 Oscar-winning film of the same name. Despite the fact that none of the movie was filmed in Fargo, the city has cleverly embraced the attention and now it’s practically compulsory for tourists to pose for a photo while feeding a fake leg into the woodchipper at the Fargo-Moorhead Visitor Centre (fargomoorhead.org).

In another canny marketing move, when the city noticed that many travellers were leaving North Dakota till last when ticking off all 50 states, it created the “Best for Last Club”. Inform the visitor centre staff that North Dakota is your final state and they’ll present you with an official “You saved the best for last” certificate.

Thankfully, it’s not just an empty promise. Downtown Fargo has many worthwhile attractions, from the restored art deco Fargo Theatre to the Plains Art Museum, which houses an impressive collection of over 4000 contemporary and Native American artworks. There’s plenty of public art too, from more than a dozen vibrant murals dotted around the city (the angel wings outside the Silver Lining Creamery gelato are an Insta favourite) to a herd of 39 life-size painted bison.