On the drive to Bengtsfors, one of my fellow singers in the Song of Joy Choir told me a story that at first sounded like a little local anecdote. We were on our way to set up our concert equipment for a performance at Folkets Park: cables, speakers, stands—the practical side of a musical evening. But the conversation quickly turned to a different kind of infrastructure—to railroads, clocks, place names, and the question of why things in the modern world have to be unambiguous.
It concerned a district of Dals Langed – Mustadfors – or, to be more precise, the place’s former name: Katrineholm.
Today, the name Katrineholmshöljen, given to the lake near the Mustadfors lock, still refers to this earlier name. There, by the watercourse, a small industrial enterprise – Katrineholms bruk – was established towards the end of the 18th century. Like many smaller ironworks in Dalsland, it ceased operations in the mid-19th century. A few decades later, however, the area took on a new industrial character: in 1898, the Norwegian company O. Mustad & Son took over the site on the Katrineholmsströmmen and built a factory there to produce horseshoe nails.
Two places with one name
The story I was told went something like this: there used to be two places in Sweden called Katrineholm. The smaller town in Dalsland had to give up its name because the other – the growing railway and industrial centre in Södermanland – already bore the same name. This had made the postal service complicated.
Research confirms the essence of this account. The name Katrineholm became increasingly problematic for the town in Dalsland because there was already another town of the same name that was becoming ever more important in terms of transport. The Dalsland Canal’s website succinctly summarises the reason: ‘Katrineholm already existed, and that became a bit of a problem for the post office.’ The town was therefore renamed Mustadfors.
When Sweden had many different times
The history of place names points to another change that took place in the 19th century: the standardisation of time.
Before the railway spread across Sweden, the time in many places was determined by the position of the sun. When the sun was at its highest point, it was midday – but not at the same time in all towns. There was a difference of around 24 minutes between Gothenburg and Stockholm. In a world where journeys by horse, carriage or ship were often measured in days, this was not a major problem.
The railway, however, demanded a different system. Timetables had to work simultaneously in many places: trains had to be able to run, cross paths, wait and arrive without every station using its own time. Initially, a common railway time was established. Some stations even had clocks with two minute hands – one for local solar time, the other for railway time.
On 1 January 1879, Sweden introduced a standard national time. The Riksdag had passed the reform in May 1878. A time was chosen that lay between the previous local times of Stockholm and Gothenburg. Sweden thus became the first country to introduce a single standard time for its entire territory.
Unambiguity and its consequences
It was not only time that was standardised with the advent of the railway, telegraphy, the postal service and modern forms of administration. Places, too, had to be uniquely identifiable within a wider network. A timetable, an address, a telegram or a delivery of goods can only function if it is clear which place is meant.
The renaming of Katrineholm to Mustadfors can be seen as a microcosm of this modern era. A long-established local name came up against requirements that extended beyond the locality itself: administration, transport, the postal service, industry and supra-regional communication. The modern order requires coordinates, registers, unambiguous addresses and standardised times.
This remains the case to this day. Postcodes, municipality names, map data, databases, search engines, navigation systems and surveillance systems all require a place to be unambiguously locatable. What became important for the postal service and the railways in the 19th century is now taken for granted in the digital age. A form tolerates no ambiguity; a navigation system demands a clear point on the map; a database requires a unique data record.
But places are more than just data points and their entries in a system. They have layers: old names, local stories, memories, names of watercourses and traces of past labour. Katrineholmshöljen reminds us that Mustadfors did not begin with the renaming, and that a landscape does not reveal its history as fully as an address in a database.
Mustadfors after the factory
As mentioned above, the name Mustadfors refers to the Mustad family and to the production of horseshoe nails, which shaped the town for over a century. The factory was not only an employer but also a central focal point for Dals Långed: for work, housing, trade, the rhythms of daily life and the identity of a former industrial town.
That era has now come to an end. In 2023, it was announced that the production of horseshoe nails would be relocated from Dals Långed to Colombia. The reasons cited were falling sales volumes in Europe, as well as a more cost-effective and streamlined production process. The relocation affected 47 employees; whilst distribution and sales were to remain in Sweden, local production would not.
This marks the loss of yet another industry in Dals Långed. It is precisely for this reason that the place name takes on an almost contradictory meaning. Mustadfors carries on the memory of an industrial world, whilst the actual production that gave this name its significance for so long no longer takes place here.
This does not mean that the town ceases to exist with the factory. Dals Långed has found other resources and other forms of cultural life: Steneby, art and crafts, clubs, local initiatives, the Folkets Hus, the canal, nature and the people who live here or are moving in. But the loss of an industry leaves not only economic but also symbolic gaps. When a factory closes, a part of a place’s shared time disappears: shift changes, journeys to work, conversations, knowledge of machines and materials, family histories.
Space, Time and Reality
Hajo would probably not have been content merely to observe that the railway and the administration had to standardise space and time. He would have asked what actually happens when we reduce space, time and places to unambiguous signs: to times, map points, names, addresses and data fields.
In his reflections on body, mind and the world, Hajo does not describe space and time as mere neutral containers in which things take place. Rather, they stand in relation to perception, the body, language, matter and energy. For him, time is also the time required for a moment to become real – for something to be experienced, remembered and perceived as part of a context.
This perhaps ties in with the history of Katrineholm and Mustadfors. The standardised timetable of the railway made timetables possible. The unambiguous place name made the postal service and administration more reliable. Both were necessary and practical. But the lived reality of a place remains more ambiguous: it consists not merely of a coordinate on the map, but of water, labour, names, losses, voices and memories.
Hajo wrote that language and symbols do not simply refer to something that already exists, but rather structure reality and allow objects to emerge only from a particular perspective. In this sense, a place name is not merely a label. It connects people to a history – whilst at the same time determining which history takes centre stage.
The place names Katrineholm and Mustadfors refer to the same place. Both serve as a reminder that space and time are not merely organised, but are also narrated, experienced and constantly recontextualised.