CARIBOU – Many people looking at a map of Maine may have pondered why two towns in Aroostook County – New Sweden and Stockholm – have a definite Scandinavian sound to them. This includes not just people from away, but many even within Aroostook itself.

The answers are forthcoming at 6 p.m. Saturday, April 13, when “The Coming of the Swedes” airs on Maine Public Television.

The hour-long documentary is the creation of filmmaker Brenda Nasberg Jepson and the seven students in her TV production class at Caribou Technology Center. Made by last year’s class, the film took most of the school year to produce and was boiled down from about 20 hours of film.

First, a short history of Maine’s Swedish Colony, much of which appears in the documentary. Many Aroostook County farmers left for greener pastures out West in the 1860s. State of Maine officials sought to protect its northern border after the Aroostook War, and needed to replace those leaving the state. William Widgery Thomas Jr., who had been a diplomatic courier in Sweden, suggested establishing a new agricultural settlement of Swedes in the forest of Township 15-Range 3.

Thomas was named commissioner of immigration by the Legislature, and he recruited the first group of Swedish immigrants. On June 25, 1870, the colony of 22 men, 11 women and 18 children sailed with Thomas. Their journey took them to Bath and Liverpool, England; Halifax, Nova Scotia; and Fredericton and Tobique Landing, New Brunswick, before they finally crossed the border into Fort Fairfield. The party traveled by wagon train over a newly cut woods road, arriving at their settlement, which Thomas named New Sweden, on July 23.

“It was quite an eye-opener to learn the history of the whole place,” Jepson said. “It was unnatural compared to how immigrant settlements [normally] occur, as they came from all over Sweden, with different histories, costumes and dialects.”

The topic was a natural for Jepson, who had earlier produced two films on Swedish immigrants, 1983’s “Copper Kettle” and 1992’s “Homecoming.” Both of her parents were of Swedish ancestry.

In 1993, Jepson was invited to talk to descendents of the Swedish colony about “Homecoming.” She drove up in a blizzard to address the group, and that night she met her future husband, Alan Jepson, also a Swede.

The event planted a seed in Jepson.

“The minute I heard the story, I thought this would make a wonderful film,” she said.

The Jepsons moved from South Addison to New Sweden in 1995. She shot the Midsommer Festival on Super 8 film that summer, and began working at the tech center that winter.

The impetus to complete the film came in the summer of 2000 when the colony’s descendents re-enacted the wagon-train trip. Jepson shot that event, then resolved to finish the documentary with her class the next school year.

One big challenge she faced was that all but one in her class were first-year students, so she had to teach them such skills as how to use all the equipment and properly conduct interviews.

The biggest surprise for Jepson was to find out how little the students knew about the Swedish colony.

“I had been hoping to get students [descended] from the colony, but they weren’t aware of the colony,” she said. “But as the students talked to their parents and grandparents about what they were doing, two kids discovered they had descended from Swedes.”

In addition to the history, the film also explored how the Swedish descendents have adhered to their traditions of dance, ethnic food, and Swedish language, including looks at the Midsommer Festival and the St. Lucia ceremony. It also looks at how the culture has preserved its artifacts in various museums. Among those interviewed were Sen. Susan Collins, a Caribou native, and Henry Thomas, grandson of W.W. Thomas.

A little ingenuity was needed to allow the class to interview Thomas, a Freeport resident. The class had previously won first prize in the New England High School Video Competition, for the video “Stan’s – A Jewel in the Crown of Maine,” and one of the prizes was a lighting class from Barbizon’s in Boston. Jepson got approval to take her class to Boston, and they stopped off to interview Thomas on the way.

Another hurdle was getting the nearly antiquated Super 8 footage transferred to video in order to complete the film. A last-minute, $1,000 grant from the Maine Humanities Council helped to complete that transfer.

Making the video was a real learning experience for the students. Alisa Rector, a senior at Limestone High School, took the class only after a nursing class that she wanted was unavailable. But now she’s leaning toward studying communications in college.

“I had no idea there was a Swedish colony in our state,” Rector said. “It was interesting to find we do have Swedish people here.”

Ashley King, another senior at LHS, said, “It’s interesting learning about all the different cultures and traditions the Swedes had and like to continue doing.”

Even after three films on one topic, Jepson finds she’s ready to do more.

“I thought that if I spent a whole year on this with my students, doing all the research, I would feel I had really covered this, and would never visit the subject again. Instead, I found there’s a lot more to do with this subject.”

There are still 130 people who speak Swedish in that area.

“I’m working on a project with a Scandinavian scholar, trying to interview these people and capture the dialects before these people are gone,” Jepson said. “Within 20 to 30 years, there won’t be anyone who speaks Swedish. The traditions still will continue, because they are so strong there.”

Copies of “The Coming of the Swedes” video are available by calling Jepson at Caribou Tech Center at 493-4270.