The establishment, under whose sign you stand, was founded in 1926, by Ingvar Kamprad, in the rural area of Småland, in Sweden. The I and K are of course the initials to his name. The E is for the name of his family farm, Elmtaryd, and the A is for the closest village, Agunnaryd.
For those of you who are interested, a -ryd is an area that has been cleared of forest for farming or building a community. That might not sound too difficult here on the prairies, but Småland is a very rocky land, and an extreme amount of work is put into clearing any land. A small piece of land, say 5 acres, may have a stone fence five feet high and ten feet thick around it from the stones gathered up in clearing the land. The land there is also very poor for farming, so in the 1800’s when drought and famine spread through Sweden, the people migrated en masse to America to find land that could sustain their families. The large number of Swedes in Minnesota are the descendants of that migration. When you hike the forests of Småland you can pass through many ‘ryd’s’ that have grown in as poplar stands in the middle of old growth evergreen forests, and contemplate the lives of those who left the area for hopes of prosperity elsewhere.
In the 70’s I had the fortune of living about 100 km north-east of Ingvar’s village.
Njuta av jakten!