Oslo, Texas

"The Worst Hard Time" pages 69-70: "Oslo, Texas, a few miles to the west, was supposed to be Norway in brown. Oslo was founded by Anders L. Mordt, late of Kristiania, Norway. Scandinavians belonged in the Dakotas, people told Mordt when he showed up in Guymon, Oklahoma, in 1909 and set up his land office. Mordt had other ideas. He vowed to build one of the biggest Norwegian colonies in the United States on empty ground just across the Texas border. He secured a hundred sections on a site he promised would soon have a rail line running through it, and he bought advertisements in Norwegian language newspapers in the United States. "Buy now before the price goes up," went one advertisement in a 1909 issue of Skandivaven. "Plenty of rain and the grains look good." The Norsemen came, about two hundred families. They erected a schoolhouse and a Lutheran church that was to be crowned by a copper bell shipped from Norway. The bell would chime over land that nobody named Grimstad or Torvik had ever before tried to call home, where meals of lefse and lutefisk would break the routine of beef and barley. Alas, the new church bell went down with the Titanic."

The notes on page 318 cite "Story of Scandinavians from Oslo on the High Plains, Peter L. Petersen, Norwegian American Historical Association, vol. 28, p. 138, 1979."

NAHA archives cite the story as A New Oslo on the Plains...or that is the most similar title in their archives. It notes it as Description "A New Oslo on the Plains; Anders L. Mordt Land Company and Norwegian Migration to the Texas Panhandle," reprint of an article published in the "Panhandle-Plains Historical Review," Canyon, Texas, 1976

The Handbook of Texas article references the same information, including the bell, the lufe and lutefisk.... and cites Peter L. Petersen, "A New Oslo on the Plains," Panhandle-Plains Historical Review 49 (1976).

...so I believe that would be the actual source.