USA > Minnesota > Brown County > History of Brown County, Minnesota: Its People, Industries and Institutions (Volume 1) > Part 5
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hotel, St. Paul, President H. C. Hotaling, pre- siding. December 30, death of Governor Ham- mond. December 31, Lieutenant-Governor Burnquist assumed the office of governor.
1916. February, discovery of discrepancies in the office of Walter J. Smith, treasurer of the state, and his subsequent resignation.
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CHAPTER II.
GEOLOGY, TIMBER, FLOWERS, ANIMALS.
Brown county is situated in the central part of south- ern Minnesota, within the basin of the Minnesota river, which is its boundary on the north. New Ulm, the largest town and county seat of Brown county, is thirty-six miles southeast from Redwood Falls. From New Ulm northeast to Minneapolis and St. Paul is a distance, in straight course, of about seventy-five miles. Two tiers of counties intervene between it and the south line of the state.
The area of Brown county is 616.75 square miles, or 394,720.82 acres, of which 6,937.52 acres are covered by water.
NATURAL DRAINAGE.
The Minnesota river, at the north side of this county, receives one large tributary, the Cottonwood (called by the Sioux the Wa-ra-ju) river, which runs easterly, di- viding Brown county into nearly equal parts on its north and south sides, uniting with the Minnesota about one and one-half miles southeast of New Ulm.
Besides this, the Minnesota river receives from this county several small creeks, from one to five miles in length. In this county the Cottonwood receives only one noteworthy tributary from the south, namely, Mound creek, which has first a northeast and then a northwest course, the latter ex-
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tending about four miles among morainic hills to its mouth, two miles east of the west line of this county. Sleepy Eye creek, the largest branch of this river, comes into it from its north side, in the east part of Leavenworth. This flows easterly, approximately parallel with the Cottonwood river, and three to ten miles from it, through a total length of about thirty miles, the first twenty-five of which are in Red- wood county.
On the south side of the Big Cottonwood river, another companion stream, the Little Cottonwood river, also flows in a nearly parallel course easterly through the south part of Brown county, being from two to seven miles distant from the Big Cottonwood along its extent of more than thirty miles. It joins the Minnesota river two miles beyond the east line of this county. It receives no tributary of consider- able size in its whole course.
LAKES.
Among the lakes of Brown county are Lone Tree lake, a half mile long, in section 9, Eden; Sleepy Eye, Cross and Mud lakes, respectively one and one-half miles, one mile, and one-half mile in extent, in Home township; Boy's lake, a mile long from northwest to southeast, in the northeast part of Burnstown, a lake of similar size and trend in sec- tion 6, Bashaw; Rice lake, a mile long from north to south, in the southwest part of Stark; Bachelor lake, of smaller size in the same township three miles farther northeast ; lake Hummel or Clear lake, a mile long from north to south, in the northeast part of Sigel; lake Hanska, seven miles long from northwest to southeast, and from an eighth to two-
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thirds of a mile wide, in Albin and Lake Hanska townships; lake Armstrong and Broom lake, farther northeast in Lake Hanska township, each about a mile long and trending southwesterly ; lake Linden and another lake situated in sec- tions 11 and 14, Linden, each exceeding a mile in length, with north to south trend, and lake Emerson, two miles long from west to east, crossed by the south line of this township. These lakes occupy hollows in the drift-sheet and many of them have neither outlet nor inlet.
TOPOGRAPHY.
This county has a smooth, gently or moderately undulat- ing surface of unmodified glacial drift or till. Some por- tions are nearly flat, and the whole country has this appear- ance when overlooked in any broad, far-reaching view; but mostly the contour is in broad swells of various extent, height and direction, generally without any uniformity in trend, and sometimes oval or nearly round.
The highest portions of adjoining undulations vary from a few rods to a half mile or more apart; and their ele- vation is sometimes five to fifteen feet, and again twenty to thirty feet, or rarely more, above the depressions, to which the descent is usually by very gentle slopes. These hollows have a form that is like that of the swells inverted, being mostly wide, and either in long and often crooked courses of unequal length, variously branched and connected one with another, or in basins from one to one hundred acres or more in extent, which have no outlet but are surrounded by land five feet or perhaps ten, twenty or thirty feet higher upon all sides. The small swamps which often fill the depressions
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are called sloughs or marshes, the former name being the most common in this prairie region, while the latter is applied to them in wooded parts of the state.
Many others of these depressions contain bodies of water, which vary from a few rods or a hundred feet to five or ten miles in length. All these are called lakes, and the term pond, which would be applied to them in the northeast- ern United States, is here restricted to reservoirs made by dams. The lakes of these counties usually lie in shallow basins, bounded by gently ascending shores, which, however, are here and there steep to the height of ten or fifteen, and rarely twenty to twenty-five feet. These higher banks are mostly at projecting points of the shore, and they have been formed by the undermining action of the waves. The foot of such banks is plentifully strewn with boulders that had been contained in the till, all the fine parts of which have been thus washed away. Other parts of the lake shore, ad- joining tracts of lowland or marsh, are frequently bordered by a flattened ridge of gravel and sand, often with inter- mixed boulders, heaped up by the action of ice in winters, in its ordinary freezing, thawing and drifting, when broken up, before the wind. These ice-formed lake-ridges rise only from three to six feet above the line of high water of the lake, and are from two or three to five or six rods wide. They occur most frequently in situations where they sep- arate the lake from a bordering marsh, whose area evident- ly was at first a part of the lake.
The Little Cottonwood river through Bashaw, in south- western Brown county, flows in a valley twenty-five feet below the general level, with an alluvial bottom an eighth to a fourth of a mile wide, not bordered by steep bluffs but by
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gentle slopes. Thence through the central part of the coun- ty this valley retains nearly the same features, and it is only in Cottonwood township, within a half dozen miles above its mouth, that its depth increases to coincide with that of the Minnesota river, to which it is tributary.
Lake Hanska, seven miles long, but somewhat river-like in its narrowness and its rather crooked east-southeast course, bordered by moderately or gently sloping shores of till that rise ten to twenty feet above it, may indicate an avenue of interglacial drainage, now in large degree filled and obscured by the till of the last glacial epoch.
The valley of the Minnesota river on the north side of this county is from one hundred and sixty-five to one hun- dred and eighty and in some portions two hundred feet deep, having a bottomland of alluvium five to twenty feet above low water and from three-fourths of a mile to one and one- half miles wide, bordered by steep bluffs which rise to the general level of the country. Within this valley at numer- ous places are jutting knobs and small ridges of gneiss and granite, exposures of Cretaceous strata, and terraces of modified drift, which are described farther on in treating of geological structure. From the top of the bluffs the vast prairie stretches away beyond the horizon, having a smooth- ly undulating surface of till, which appears to be in general approximately level, though a considerable ascent, varying in amount from seventy-five to one hundred and fifty feet, is made imperceptibly in a distance of twenty to twenty-five miles southwestward across this county.
Here and there this sheet of unmodified glacial drift or boulder-clay, the direct deposit of the ice-sheet, is sprinkled with knolls, small and short ridges, or mounds, of gravel
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and sand, which rise sometimes by steep, but again by moderate or gentle slopes, ten to fifteen or twenty feet above the general level.
In the southwest corner of this county, its even contour, which to this distance from the Minnesota river may be called in general a vast plain, is changed; and a gradual rise of two hundred or three hundred feet takes place within a distance of a few miles, along a massive terrace which ex- tends from northwest to southeast and east-southeast. This line of highland forms the northeastern border and first prominent ascent of the Coteau des Prairies, which farther west rises gradually and at length steeply again, to the much higher watershed between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. The south part of Stately, the most southwest town- ship of Brown county, lies upon the foot of the sloping border of the Coteau, which here is formed by the massive, mostly drift-covered ridge of red quartzite that extends in a nearly east to west direction in northern Cottonwood county, its crest being one to two miles south of the south line of Stately.
The only tract in these counties that exhibits a conspic- uously morainic contour is in Stately, and reaches from the elbow of Mound creek six miles west into the edge of Ger- mantown in Cottonwood county, with a width of three or four miles, bounded on the north by the Cottonwood river. It is crossed by the lower part of Mound creek, so named because of its mounds, ridges and hills, which are twenty- five to seventy-five or one hundred feet high, abrupt and strewn with boulders and pebbles.
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ALTITUDES.
Elevations on the Winona & St. Peter Division, Chi- cago & Northwestern Railway, in Brown county, taken by John E. Blunt, engineer, Winona :
Feet above the sea.
Minnesota river, bridge.
821
Minnesota river, high water
807
New Ulm
837
Siding
994
Sleepy Eye
1034
Springfield
1025
The elevation of the Minnesota river along the north side of this county, at its ordinary stage of water, twenty to twenty-five feet below its high floods, is approximately as follows:
Feet above the sea.
At the line between Redwood and Brown counties 798
At Fort Ridgely
793
At New Ulm
784
At the mouth of the Big Cottonwood river 782
At the east line of Brown county 778
The Little Cottonwood crosses the south line of Stately, entering Brown county, at a height of about 1,150 feet above the sea. In the central part of this county, two miles south of Iberia, its height is estimated to be 960 feet; at the east line of Sigel, 900 feet, and at the east line of the county, 825 feet.
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Brown county has its highest land upon the northern slope of the ridge of red quartzite at the south side of sec- tions 31, 32 and 33, of Stately, its most southwestern town- ship, which reach to 1,200 or 1,250 feet above the sea, 200 feet higher than the Cottonwood river at the north side of this township, but 100 feet or more below the top of this ridge, a mile farther south. The lowest land of this county is where the Minnesota river leaves it, about 778 feet above the sea. The average height above the sea level of the town- ships of Brown county is estimated as follows: New Ulm city, 875 feet; Cottonwood, 950; Linden, 1,020; Milford, 950; Sigel, 990; Lake Hanska, 1,030; Home, 1,000; Stark, 1,000; Albin, 1,040; Eden, 990; Prairieville, 1,040; Leavenworth, 1,020; Mulligan, 1,060; Burnstown, 1,040; Bashaw, 1,090; North Star, 1,060; Stately, 1,050. From these estimates the mean elevation of this county is found to be approximately 1,025 feet.
SOIL AND TIMBER.
This county has throughout its whole extent an excel- lent soil, well suited for the production of all the common cereals, garden vegetables and small fruits of this latitude. The principal crops cultivated are wheat and oats, corn and potatoes, sorghum for the manufacture of syrup, and flax for linseed oil. Stock-raising and dairying also receive con- siderable attention. A black soil, everywhere from one to two feet thick, and often reaching to a depth of three or four feet in the depressions, forms the surface, being glacial drift or till, colored by a small proportion of humic acid derived from decaying vegetation. This drift is principally
(6)
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clay, with which is an intermixture of sand and gravel, with occasional but not frequent boulders. Its composition makes it quite unfit for brick-making, but gives it a porous char- acter, so that rains and the waters of snow-melting are soon absorbed by it, excepting the large part which is drained away by the gentle slopes and the numerous water-courses. Below the soil, cellars and wells find a continuation of this till, yellow in color and commonly soft enough to be dug with a spade, to a depth of ten to twenty feet or sometimes more, and then dark bluish and usually harder to a great depth beyond, which is seldom passed through.
Brown county is mainly prairie, or natural grass land, without tree or shrub, but one continuous green sward, often reaching in gentle undulations and swells, five to twenty feet high, as far as the view extends. But this county has considerable timber skirting all the larger streams and lakes. A nearly continuous, though often very narrow strip of timber is found immediately bordering the Minnesota river through almost its entire course; but generally much of the bottomland is treeless. The bluffs on the northeast side of this river have for the most part only thin and scanty groves. The southwestern bluffs, on the contrary, are generally heav- ily wooded, excepting two miles next northwest from New Ulm. Next above this for about fifteen miles, through Mil- ford, Home and part of Eden townships, both the bottom land and the southwestern bluff are densely timbered to a distance from the river varying from a quarter of a mile to one mile. The greater abundance of timber on the southern bluffs of this and other rivers in this region of prairie ap- pears to be due to their being less exposed to the sun, and therefore more moist, than the bluffs on the opposite side.
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Along the Cottonwood river in the western part of Brown county, and along the upper part of the Little Cot- tonwood river, the width of woodland, excepting occasional interruptions, usually varies from a few rods to an eighth of a mile; but along the last twenty miles of the Cottonwood river, and the last eight miles of the Little Cottonwood, the timber generally fills their valleys, from a fourth of a mile to one mile wide.
The lakes of western Brown county have only narrow margins of timber ; but in central and eastern Brown county groves of considerable extent border Sleepy Eye lake, the southeast part of lake Tanska, and lakes Armstrong and Linden, and reach a mile southeast from the last to Emer- son lake.
At Sleepy Eye lake the principal species of trees are burr-oak, bass, white and red or slippery elm, white ash, box-elder, cottonwood, poplar, hackberry, the Kentucky coffee-tree and the wild plum.
GEOLOGICAL STRUCTURE.
The foundation of Brown county, northwest from New Ulm, consists of metamorphic gneiss and granite, belonging to the great series denominated Eozoic or Archaean, which embraces the most ancient rocks known to geology. This is overlain by various shales, sandstones, limestones and clays, the latter sometimes holding beds of lignite, which are regarded together as of Cretaceous age. Exposures of these Cretaceous rocks continue in the Minnesota valley southeast from New Ulm, but there and through southern Brown county they probably lie upon red Potsdam quartzite, which
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outcrops on each side. Upon the east this quartzite is seen in Courtland, Nicollet county, two miles southeast from New Ulm. It is not exposed in this part of Brown county. Upon the west it makes a massive ridge. The north base of this ridge reaches into Stately, making falls in section 31 on one of the head-streams of Mound creek. Cretaceous strata, in- cluding lignite, outcrop on the Cottonwood river in western Brown county. Fossiliferous and sometimes lignitic clays of Cretaceous age are occasionally encountered in this region. These formations will be described in the order of their age, beginning with the oldest.
Gneiss and granite. These rocks have the same com- position, being made of quartz, feldspar and mica. Gneiss differs from granite in having these minerals laminated, or arranged more or less distinctly in layers. Nearly all the metamorphic rocks to be described here are varieties of gneiss, with which masses of granite, syenite and mica and hornblende schists occur rarely.
In Brown county no exposures of the Eozoic rocks have been examined. Their outcrops in Brown county are of small extent, including only a few localities on the bottom- land of the Minnesota valley along the northern boundary of Eden and Home townships. Their extent southeastward is to "Little Rock," about five miles below Ft. Ridgely, beyond which the only outcrop of these rocks in the Minnesota valley is a small area of granite opposite the southeast part of New Ulm.
Potsdam quartzite. The red quartzite of southwestern Minnesota is destitute of fossils, but from its stratigraphic relations it appears to belong to the Potsdam age. The only outcrop of this formation within this vicinity is in Brown
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county, less than a mile from its southwest corner, being in section 31, Stately.
In the north part of section 31, Stately, this red quartz- ite, or metamorphic sandstone, occurs in its typical char- acter, being very hard, varying in color from reddish gray to dark dull red, and much divided by joints into rhom- boidal masses, mostly only one to two or three feet long. It is exposed upon a tract of four or five acres, forming a pic- turesque little water-fall on a southern branch of Mound creek, and reaching thence thirty rods or more to the east and south. The dip is about five degrees south. In some places the layers are obliquely laminated, this false bedding being partly steeper to the south, and partly, in other places, level or slightly inclined northward.
Cretaceous beds. Cretaceous strata, doubtless, lie next below the drift upon the greater part of this district; but their only outcrops, excepting within the Minnesota valley and the gorge of the Redwood river, occur on the Cotton- wood river in Brown county.
The first discovery of lignite, or brown coal, on the Cot- tonwood river was made in 1861 by John F. and Daniel Burns, of Burnstown, in its north bank, near the northeast corner of section 34, North Star. The upper part of this bank, which is about twenty feet high, consists of alluvial sand and gravel, a few feet thick. The section of the Cre- taceous beds below, as recorded by Eames, in the report of his survey as state geologist in 1866, is, first, iron ore, much broken; then, marly shale, three feet; impure lignite, two and one-half feet; and dark shale to the bed of the river, ten feet. The third of these beds is a black, lignitic shale, en- closing a thickness of about four inches of quite clear lignite.
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A quarter of a mile south from this outcrop, a shaft was sunk to explore for coal, a year or two before the date of Mr. Eames' report. He described the section below the drift as follows: "1. Bands of ironstone, and crystals of selenite enclosed in shale, with a seam of imperfect coal, thirteen feet. 2. Yellow sandstone, three feet. 3. Dark colored clay (siliceous), containing iron pyrites, argillaceous iron and sandstone alternating, 64 feet. The clay in this formation is well adapted for refractory brick and the manufacture of pottery ware."
Later exploration for coal was made in 1875 and again in 1878, by shafts forty or fifty feet deep, on the north side of the river near the point where the lignite is found in the river-bank, as before described. These encountered a layer of lignite, a few inches thick, at about the same level with its outcrop beside the river.
About two miles below this locality, and nearly a mile southwest from Springfield station, the north bank of the Cottonwood river in the northeast quarter of section 25, North Star, contains the following beds, according to Mr. Eames:
"1. Shaly marl, three feet. 2. Impure coal, two feet. 3. Sandstone, to bed of river, partially covered by talus, five feet."
This sandstone, some portions of which are richly fos- siliferous, is exposed along a distance of four or five rods, and has been somewhat quarried. A specimen of it, show- ing very distinct impressions of leaves, and another con- taining numerous casts of shells, have been presented to the survey by John F. Burns. A complete leaf is shown, five inches long and three-fourths inch wide, lanceolate, entire,
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tapering into a short petiole. This has been identified by Dr. Leo Lesquereux as Laurus Nebrascensis, Lesq. He also reports with this Salix proteaefolia, Lesq., and a new spe- cies of Ficus.
Three miles farther down the stream, its north bank in section 16, Burnstown, has a similar exposure of rock, de- scribed by Eames as "buff and gray sandstone, thinly lamin- ated, ten feet in thickness, descending to the bed of the river; it contains stems and leaves of plants but too much broken to decide either character or class."
The next localities where outcrops of Cretaceous beds are known to occur on the Cottonwood river, are in Sigel and Milford, about eight miles, and again about five miles, west from New Ulm. Sandstone of yellowish, iron-rusty color, nearly level in stratification, partly friable, but con- taining hard layers up to one foot in thickness, exposed along a distance of several rods and rising five to ten feet above the river, is reported at two points in the south bank, about sixty rods apart, in the northeast quarter of sec- tion 6, Sigel. Above the rock-outcrops the wooded bluffs, probably consisting of till, rise about one hundred feet.
In the northwest quarter of section 3, at the south side of Milford, the north bank of the Cottonwood river has a height of sixty or seventy feet, and exhibits the following section : yellow till, about fifteen feet; gray sandstone, con- taining lignitic particles, only one foot in thickness exposed; and dark, bluish clay, free from gravel or grit, but in some parts enclosing specks and small lumps of iron pyrites, which render it unfit for manufacture of pottery, having a thickness of twenty-five feet clearly exposed; below which the remaining twenty-five feet of the bluff is concealed by
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the talus. From the wooded south bluff, in Sigel, a sixth of a mile farther southeast, but probably within the same quarter-section, clay nearly like the foregoing has been much excavated for use by the potters at New Ulm and for- merly at Mankato. This clay is very fine and uniform in character, containing neither grit nor pyrites. It is dug be- tween forty and sixty feet above the river. These beds seem to have no fossils.
About a mile farther east, near the middle of section 35, Milford, the northern bank of the Cottonwood river shows very fine, nearly white, crumbling sandstone, alternating with shale, reaching in some places thirty to forty feet above the river. The bedding is lenticular and inconstant. A layer of yellowish brown, ferruginous and more firm sand- stone, with a dip of three or four degrees toward the west, exposed here about ten feet above the river, contains plenti- ful impressions of dicotyledonous leaves of numerous species. A considerable collection of these was made by Professor Winchell, and determined by Dr. Leo Lesquereux, who stated in correspondence that his observations of fossil leaves in 1856 were at this locality or in its immediate vicin- ity. The list is as follows: Magnolia alternans, Heer; An- dromeda Parlalorii, Heer; Cinnamomum Scheuchzeri, Heer; Platanus primaeva, Lesq .; Salix proteaefolia, Lesq .; Populus cyclophylla, Lesq .; P. elegans, Lesq .; P. Lancas- triensis, Lesq. (probably the same with P. cordifolia, New- berry) ; P. litigiosa, Heer; Populites cyclophyllus, Lesq .; Protophyllum crednerioides, Lesq., Cissus sp. nov .; Laurus sp. nov .; Pinus sp. nov., and fragments referred doubtfully to Persea and Ficus. Nine of these species, according to Dr. Lesquereux, have been recognized in the Dakota group,
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