08/15/2026
Beautiful MN history up in Moorhead!
The Hjemkomst is a seventy-six foot Viking ship sitting in a climate-controlled hall in Moorhead, Minnesota, and it got there by crossing the North Atlantic. Not a replica that stayed on a trailer. An actual open wooden vessel that sailed from Duluth to Bergen, Norway in 1982 with a crew of twelve aboard.
Robert Asp built it. He was a junior high guidance counselor in Moorhead with Norwegian roots and no shipbuilding background. In 1971 he bought an old potato warehouse in Hawley and started work, shaping oak he had cut and milled himself, following the lines of the Gokstad ship excavated in Norway a century earlier. Friends and family helped. It took years. Neighbors drove past that warehouse for most of a decade wondering what exactly was happening in there.
He launched it on Lake Superior in 1980 and sailed it that summer. He was already sick by then. Leukemia took him that December, and the ship he named Hjemkomst, meaning homecoming, sat without the man who built it.
His children decided to finish what he started. In May 1982 the crew left Duluth, went through the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence, and pushed out into open ocean. Somewhere in the North Atlantic the hull cracked along a plank seam. They patched it at sea and kept going. Six thousand miles later they came into Bergen harbor to a crowd on the docks, having sailed a homemade ship built in a Minnesota potato warehouse to the country their family left generations earlier.
The ship came home and now anchors the Hjemkomst Center on the Red River. The building is designed so you see the vessel all at once when you walk in, mast raised, hull curving up to the carved prow, close enough to read the grain in the oak. Displays around it carry the logbooks, the photographs and the story in the crew's own words.
Outside sits the Hopperstad Stave Church, a full-scale replica of a twelfth century Norwegian church, built by a Moorhead man named Guy Paulson in another act of stubborn devotion. Two enormous handmade objects, two ordinary men, one small city on the North Dakota border.
The thing people remember is not the woodworking. It is that a guidance counselor decided in 1971 that he was going to build a Viking ship, and that after he died his kids sailed it to Norway anyway.
