History of Olmsted County, Minnesota, Part 2

Author: Joseph A. Leonard
Publication date: 1910
Publisher:
Number of Pages: 736

USA > Minnesota > Olmsted County > History of Olmsted County, Minnesota > Part 2

Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).

White, Milo 113, 300

Tvedt, T. B. I.

631

Twohey, Timothy

504

Whited, C. A. 134

234

Whiting, E. P

128

Whitney, J. S.

434

Van Campen, Charles 218, 422

Van Dooser, J. F.

Van Dusen, Frank R.

562

Van Dusen, George W.

.232,

562

Vedder. A. D.

227

Wilkins, Noah .. 230

Williams, William

646

Vine, Mrs. Lydia.

297

Williams, D. H.

223

Vivyan, T. B ..

351

Willson, Charles C. 165

Wilson, Hugh 634

634

Wing, Marcus

115

Wing, Miss Cora

170

Wagoner, Joseph H 222, 660

Wirt, George W.

101

Wagoner, Carl H.

660

Wagoner. Roy M. 660

Withrow, J. P

321

Woodworth, G. 201

Wood, M. R ... 133

Wooldridge. E. S 106

Wright, J. L. 116

Walker. S. J. 369

Wallingford, J. N. 66

Younglove, Dr. C. S. 201

Ward, Charles M 468

Ward, William

468

Ward. James

468

Zimmerman, Louis

503

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Whitney, C. H.

104

Whitney, John H. 103

Whitten, Samuel. 233

Vermilya, J. I. 324

Vroman, Arthur E

585

Waby, Timothy

659

Waldron, Robert G. 463, 464

Waldron, Robert

463

Waldron, George W

241, 463

Witherstine, Dr. H. H .. 178, 593

Walden, E. H .. 173

Whiting, Anderson

Underleak, Joseph 157

Ungemach, Henry

224

Welch, Amos 461

Welch, Elmer A. 462

Toogood, Dwight

574

Wheeler, Miss E. A.

Tvedt, Christopher I 588

White, W. H. 126, 128

Whitney, David

Vine, E. H. 174

Wilson, James

Zimmerman, Albert

503

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J.A. Leonard.

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HISTORY OF OLMSTED CAN -

GEOLOGY.

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HISTORY OF OLMSTED COUNTY

been generally tapped and drained, though they are still occasionally met with on the less traveled roads.

Water Power .- Olmsted county is more than usually favored with good water power. This results from the large number of streams, the swiftness of their currents, and the favorable nature of the banks and bottom. The Zumbro river, in some of its affluents, has a descent of about 350 feet within the county, from Rock Dell to Oronoco, while the main stream descends, about 200 feet in the same distance. The Root river falls 300 feet within the county in passing through Rock Dell, High Forest, Pleasant Grove and Orion townships.

There is quite a number of unimproved water powers in the county ; some are between Rochester and the north boundary of the county, where the difficulties of the banks prevent their ready improvement. There are said to be two good mill privileges between the Oronoco mills and the main stream; another is at Genoa, an- other at High Forest and several at Chatfield.

Topography .- The surface is much diversified, and the natural scenery very pleasing to the eye. The surface is generally rolling or undulating. Along the streams bluffs are found some- times nearly 200 feet high. These bluffs are usually steep. level- topped, and characteristic of the rock formation that makes them. They are most common in the central and eastern parts of the county. Rochester lies in a valley, with bluffs all around it, rising gently at some distance on all sides, except toward the west, where it climbs the bluff. Dover Center, Marion and Chatfield lie in similar valleys. Eyota and Byron are on elevated, undulating prairies, nearly 1,300 feet above the ocean. Curious isolated mounds are common, especially along the east side of the Zumbro in Farmington and Haverhill townships. They are also found in Elmira. In the western portion of the county the surface is nearly level, but also more elevated. Much of Rock Dell township is like the prairies just south and west of it, but in its northern part are narrow rocky gorges formed by the south branch of the Zumbro, which gave name to the town.

* * *

The Geological Structure of Olmsted County .- The outcrops of rock are numerous throughout the county and are specially frequent along the tops of the bluffs that line the deeply eroded valleys that prevail over several counties in this part of the state. This system of deep valleys tributary to the great Mississippi toward the east, ceases rather suddenly in Olmsted county. The streams and all ravines rise in the western part of this county, to near the surface of the surrounding country, and flow upon the drift-sheet which grows deeper and deeper as one passes further westward. This material is rather thin in Olmsted county, except in the southwest corner, where it is thick enough to conceal the rock features entirely.

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HISTORY OF OLMSTED COUNTY

Eastward it appears only in thin outlines, marking the ragged edge of deposition, or in patches and masses which are remnants left by subaqueous erosion. In order to see to the best advantage the changes either in the drift, the features of erosion, or the stratifica- tion of the rocks, one must cross the county obliquely. The drift is lightest, generally speaking, in the northeastern corner, and thickest in the southwestern corner. On the other hand, the south- eastern and northwestern corners are much alike in the very features in which the other two corners differ. In a rough way the lines of change cross the county diagonally in a southeasterly and north- westerly direction. This is due to two facts which have some rela- tion to each other. In the first place the great river in the vicinity of the county runs in a generally southeast direction. The erosion valleys extending from it would tend to take a direction perpen- dicular to it, and the lines of equal depths of erosion would tend to be parallel to it; again, the dip of the rocks of this county is slight toward the southwest; hence the edges of the strata as pre- sented on the surface would tend to be in lines perpendicular to this direction.

There are no signs of noteworthy upheaval, depression or other changes, in the relations of the strata to each other in this county, as in the whole of this part of the state the strata are in general con- formable. The peculiar structure of the bluffs enables one to trace some of the strata at a distance. As far as the eye can follow them thin planes occupy the same position with reference to the horizon.

The strata do not lie in a horizontal plane, but they dip slightly toward the southwest-perhaps at the rate of ten feet to the mile.

The stratigraphy of this fine county is easy to read in most cases. The form of the bluffs, the line of springs marking a definite point in the rocks of the Trenton period, the varying solubility of the rock and the consequent occurrence of sinkholes and caves in one formation and not in another, the notably distinct lithological char- acters of some of the formations, and the gradual and regular dip of the strata, when taken with the erosion, enable one to decide with certainty the rock over which he is standing, even when it is hidden from view. All these enable one to read the stratigraphical enigma of the county with little trouble.

Olmsted county furnishes an excellent field for teaching stratig- raphy to a class of students. The strata are interesting. The char- acters mentioned above make the reading of them, under their varied degrees of exposure and erosion, easy and instructive. For instruction in geological field work no district could be better adapted.

The soil of Olmsted county is and always will remain its chief source of material wealth. It has great variety. It is arenaceous in some of the valleys, and produces and ripens crops quickly, but it is more clayey on the uplands, and generally blackened by charred

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HISTORY OF OLMSTED COUNTY

grasses and other vegetation-the residue of the prairie fires that formerly raged annually over the most of the county.

Hurlbut on the Geology of Southern Minnesota .- In 1871 Mr. W. D. Hurlbut, of Rochester, Minnesota, contributed a series of papers to the Minnesota Teacher on the geology of southern Minnesota, which were subsequently issued together as a pamphlet. These papers supply a lack, which was a conspicuous and remark- able one in the geological literature of the state-considering the general accuracy and fullness of Owen's report-since no geologist had before penetrated this part of Minnesota and nobody had called attention to its marked topography or to its geology. Owen's parties passed around it. They ascended the Mississippi, the Minnesota and the Des Moines, but the valleys of the Root and the Zumbro were not examined. It is in these valleys and particularly on the upper tributaries, that the upper parts of the Silurian and the Devonian are found exposed.

Taking the Mississippi river and the measurements and descrip- tions of Dr. Owen as initial points, Mr. Hurlbut follows up the streams coming from the west. across the strike of the formations, noting the changes as they occur in the strata, and stating their main characteristics and the thicknesses. He thus makes out the Pots- dam, the Lower Magnesian, St. Peter sandstone, Trenton lime- stone flags, Hudson river shales, argillaceous shales which he regards of the age of the Clinton and the Devonian. He also outlines their geographical extent and states some of their topo- graphic features. His identifications, being the first recorded attempt to parallelize those strata with any recognized base of nomenclature in the state of Minnesota, and dependent for the greater part on lithological features, were subject to such changes as a study of the fossils might require. His Hudson river shales were restricted to the very base of the rocks of that formation and designated "Hudson river oil shales," having a maximum thickness of fifteen feet. They are the "Green shales" of the early reports of progress of the survey, and probably belong to the Hudson river group. His shaly limestone (Clinton) is the upper part of the Hudson river, becoming in some places a very calcareous member almost without shales. His Devonian, in which the arenaceous parts were supposed to be Schoharie sandstone is the buff magnesian limestone of the Galena. The elevated land, further southwest from the strike of the last in Mower and Fillmore counties, he suggests may contain higher formations, such as the Iowa Subcarboniferous formation, but in the absence of exposures of the rock nothing could be ascertained without artificial excava- tion.

The discussion of the "Tertiary phenomena" by Mr. Hurlbut embraces Prof. J. D. Whitney's view of the origin of the driftless

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HISTORY OF OLMSTED COUNTY

area in Iowa, and the opinions of Gen. G. K. Warren concerning the former direction of drainage of the Minnesota and upper Mississippi "westward into the Cretaceous ocean," in which he groups in a new and interesting manner many topographic and hypsometric facts, going to show that the interior of the state is a basin whose greatest depression is along the valley of the Minne- sota from its source to the head of Lake Pepin. "The supposed surface and shore line of this lake basin is very well indicated, in many places, at about one thousand feet elevation above the sea, by clay terraces and bluffs, containing trunks and branches of trees, lignite clay and other lacustrine formations."

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EARLIEST HISTORY.

O LMSTED county is located in the heart of southeastern Minnesota, the agricultural region of the state, with only the width of Winona county, some twenty-five miles, between it and the great Mississippi river on the east, and of Fillmore and Mower county between it and the state of Iowa on the south. It is thirty miles in length, from east to west, and twenty-five miles in its greatest width, from north to south, and comprises six hundred and forty-four square miles of as fine a farming region as enriches the Middle West.

In the progress of that wave of civilization that surged westward from Jamestown and Plymouth it was nearly two centuries and a half before this became the home of the white man.

This portion of that great Northwest which lay in the unknown space stretching apparently from the early seaboard settlements to the setting sun was part of an undefined region inhabited, or roamed over, by Indians, but from the first knowledge of it by white intruders, claimed by them under the international usage of those days by which any European setting up the flag of his country anywhere in the Western Continent, established the sovereignty of that country over all that lay beyond. Under such sovereignty as this the region west of the Mississippi, including most of what is now Minnesota and several other states, was claimed by France by virtue of the explorations of Frenchmen, later sold by France to Spain, retransferred by Spain to France under the great Napoleon and by him sold to the United States under the administration of President Jefferson, in the celebrated Louisiana purchase.

The title of those royal real estate dealers to the realty that they transferred was about as valid as that of Satan, the largest land speculator, to the kingdoms of the earth that he failed to trade off on a certain historic occasion.

The adventures and experiences, as narrated by themselves, of the French fur traders, Catholic priests, trappers and voyageurs who followed the streams in primitive canoes, always on the watch for outlets to the ocean, mixed as they are with exaggerations, add much to the romance of American history.

On the acquisition of this vast domain the United States divided it into two territories, the northern one comprising the now states of Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa and Minnesota west of the Mississippi. This was, later, made the Territory of Missouri and on the organi- zation of the State of Missouri, all to the northward was left

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HISTORY OF OLMSTED COUNTY

without territorial organization. Later it became a part of the Territory of Michigan and then of the Territory of Wisconsin, and still later, of the Territory of Iowa.

March 3, 1849, the Territory of Minnesota was created, with the boundaries now those of the state.

Prior to the white occupancy the Indian title to this portion of the new land, if the kind of eminent domain that they exercised may be dignified as a title, was in the Wapasha, or Red Wing band of Sioux or Dakotas. Their principal villages were on the Mississippi, at or near the present sites of Red Wing, Wabasha, Winona and La Crosse, and this far west would seem to have been only a hunting ground.

For the first few years after the arrival of white settlers occasional small parties of Indians would camp for a few days in this vicinity on their way to or from the Mississippi, and as late as 1862 a party stayed a couple of days near the court house in Rochester. They were always peaceable, never disturbing the settlers except by their demands for something to satisfy their ever hungry appetites. It is narrated in Eaton's History as told by Esquire Bucklen, that about two hundred camped about six weeks in the early winter of 1854, on the river bottom near the mill in North Rochester, and lost four of their number by sickness, in consequence of which they changed their camp, abandoning a sick girl who was rescued from starvation and cared for by Mr. Bucklen's family till taken back by her tribe.

The only vestige within the county of occupancy by the noble and dirty aboriginies that I have known of was a small burying ground on a beautiful and sightly point of bluff on the north edge of Rochester on the now farm of Carl L. Schultz, near the Donahue quarry and the Cascade mill. On the crest of the bluff four or five graves were ranged. The bodies had been laid on the rocky surface, and a roof of shakes protected each one, but time, and perhaps white people. had desecrated the graves, and bones and beads could be seen through the crumbled sides. The graves were there as late as 1862, but now the rocks are bare and the graves gone; swept away, it is thought, in the cyclone of 1883. So passed away the Indian occupancy.

A few evidences of the existence of the pre-historic man, that conjectural individual of whom so much has been written and so little known, have been found in the picking up of implements and utensils of copper and stone in different localities of the county. John W. Peck, agent at Rochester of the Laird Norton Lumber Company, a diligent collector of curiosities, has in his collection some rare Olmsted county specimens : A copper spear head seven inches long and very well finished, found in the garden of J. Durham Fuller in Rochester: a copper spear head found on the Thomas

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HISTORY OF OLMSTED COUNTY

farm, near Carrollsville in High Forest township, by one of the Thomas boys ; a copper ax six and a half by three inches in size, and another smaller one found by boys on the Ginther farm, north of Stewartville ; a copper knife five inches long, found by County Sur- veyor Charles H. Armstrong, at Carrollsville: a slate implement thirteen inches long. worn by use, found on Root river, about a mile west of Stewartville; a large stone ax ten inches long and three inches wide, exceptionally well finished, found in New Haven township by A. Reamer ; half a dozen smaller stone axes or kelts. found in different parts of the county, a number of discoidal stones, two slate pendants, a large number of stone arrow points and an iron tomahawk.

There is no reason to believe that the buffalo roamed over the Olmsted prairies : the bones or horns of the awkward beasts were not found by the first settlers, but elk were frequently seen and shot and their horns were often found.

The last elk was shot on the Bamber farm by Asahel Smith, of Rochester, in 1859. It had been seen by a party consisting of Mr. Smith, George W. Baker and Horace Loomis, but Smith got the last shot. It was a beautiful young creature, as it laid displayed to public admiration on the sidewalk in front of Smith & Daniels' office, on Broadway.

The early settlements of the territory were along the navigable streams. It was the steamboat, not the locomotive. that built towns then. Trading posts and small villages were located and known years before any attempt was made to colonize the farming regions almost contiguous to them. So slow was the progress of development that La Crosse was not started till 1842 and St. Paul may be said to have begun its present existence in 1846 or 1847. and Winona was located, as a hamlet, in 1851.

The Indian title to southern Minnesota was extinguished by two treaties with the Sioux. made at Traverse and at Mendota in 1851, and ratified by the United States Government in 1853. The Indians were shoved along to reservations farther west on the Min- nesota river.

Even before the Indians had been induced "to get off the face of the earth" a few of the most adventurous pioneers had dared to claim homes beyond the Mississippi, and after the land became known as government property. the tide of immigration set in and farms were located without waiting for the government to survey it into separate sections.

And it was a most attractive region that invited the immigrant to its improvement. This county may be described as a tract of prairie and timber of rich soil and well watered. The surface is rolling, with broad valleys and sloping bluffs. The streams were fringed with trees and across the west side of the county was a belt of heavy

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HISTORY OF OLMSTED COUNTY

timber, which, since the first settlement, has much of it been burned up in the homes of the farmers and in the stoves of Rochester, and now the former forest is a cluster of well tilled farms. There were also timber tracts on the south, in the neighborhood of Chatfield, and in Quincy to the northeast. The Zumbro river and its tribu- taries are well spread over the western half of the county, enriching several townships, while the Whitewater and its branches add to the value of the northeastern townships, and the Root river and its branches to the southeastern townships.

Estimates of the average heights of the townships of the county, compiled from the notes of Horace E. H. Horton in his survey of the line of a proposed railroad from Wabasha to Austin, are as follow : Quincy, 1,150 feet above the sea; Elmira, 1, 175; Viola, 1,225; Eyota, 1,205 : Orion, 1,200; Farmington, 1, 125; Haverhill, 1,200; Marion, 1,200: Pleasant Grove. 1.250; Oronoco, 1,075; Cascade, 1,075 : Rochester, 1.125 ; High Forest, 1,275 ; New Haven, 1, 100; Kalmar, 1, 150; Salem, 1, 175 : Rock Dell, 1,275. The mean elevation of the county, derived from these figures, is approximately 1,180 feet above the sea.

A distinguishing peculiarity of the county is the uniform excel- lence of its farming land. Scarcely a poor tract is to be found within its limits, and it is doubtful whether any county of the state has less land unadapted to some kind of profitable farming.

The little river that, with its branches, waters the west half of the county and divides the city of Rochester, has a name of its own that is unique in its derivation. The early French explorers, finding it a crooked stream and full of obstructions, named it Riviere des Embarrass, which became abbreviated and corrupted by the careless and slurring pronunciation of the voyageurs and trappers into Zumbro, by which it has since been called.

Col. Albert Milton Lea, who, in command of United States dragoons, explored southern Minnesota in 1835, and discovered and named Lake Albert Lea, in addressing a meeting of old settlers there, describing his march of forty years previous, said: "We crossed the Cedar river at the rapids near the present city of that name; then, surmounting the high table land, we descended through a romantic valley, cut through the soft rocks several hundred feet below the adjacent level and traversed by a winding stream of crystal water with sandy bottom and full of fish, picturesque with many varied trees and forests and castellated with many rocky pro- jections. This led us down to a river named by me 'Embarrass.' from the obstructing driftwood found in it, but one of the most curious transformations of this region is the conversion of the 'Embarrass' into the Zumbro. On a little brook running into this stream we encamped three days, and from it we took with pinhooks all the gold-speckled trout that we could all consume, and so fat were they, they required no butter for dressing."

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HISTORY OF OLMSTED COUNTY

The stream seems to have been named Des Embarrass long before Colonel Lea discovered it. I have seen an old map by one of the early explorers on which it is named the Embarrass river.

Gen. H. H. Sibley, in the St. Paul Pioneer, in 1867, speaks of "The Rivierre aux Embarras, since corrupted into Zumbro."

Thomas Simpson, of Winona, who made the original survey of the county, says: "The stream was given on our maps, made by Nicollet and Fremont, as the Embarris, a French translation of the Indian name Waziouji."

Mr. Simpson said in a speech at the dedication of the Rochester Public Library, that the Indians had called the stream Waziouja. meaning the hindered river, and the French afterwards named it Des Embarris.

In the summer of 1854 a few settlements were made ; at Pleasant Grove, Rochester and Oronoco, but mostly in the eastern part of the county, in the townships of Dover and Elmira.

The first settler within the limits of the county was Jacob Goss. who located a claim in what is now Pleasant Grove township, in the spring of 1853. No other settlement is known to have been made that year. In 1854, following the custom of many first set- tlers, he sold out. The purchaser was the Pattridge family, consist- ing of Mrs. Pattridge, a widow from Iowa, and her sons. There were eighty acres in crops and the price paid was $1,000. Goss went to St. Paul, and it is not known what became of him : probably he pushed on farther west.

In the spring of 1854 M. O. Walker, of Chicago, established a line of stages from Dubuque to St. Paul, going through Pleasant Grove, Rochester and Oronoco, and a line was later established from Winona through Rochester to Mankato, and that became the main route across southern Minnesota. Walker was for that day and those times, as great a pioneer of transportation and as great a factor in the development of the West as that great man, James J. Hill, of the Great Northern railroad, is today. For years the Frink and Walker and M. O. Walker lines radiated from Chicago into the farther west, penetrating wherever the pioneer settler or speculator located a center of population, and blazing the route for the westward progress of the nation. The Concord coach, or more often, the old canvas-covered hack, irreverently known as a mud wagon, lumbering and fatiguing. with its team of four or six horses, driven by a profane driver over all kinds of rough and muddy or snow-drifted roads in all kinds of uncomfortable weather. was the welcome precursor of the railroad passenger train with its luxurious palace cars, and the making a new settlement a station for the stoppage of the stages was as much to be desired then as the location of a station on a new railroad would be now.

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History of Olmsted County, Minnesota, Part 2

Author: Joseph A. Leonard Publication date: 1910 Publisher: Number of Pages: 736

Author: Joseph A. Leonard
Publication date: 1910
Publisher:
Number of Pages: 736