USA > Minnesota > Olmsted County > History of Olmsted County, Minnesota > Part 29
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The first death was of a child of David Baumgartner, in 1856, and the first marriage was of Jacob Bonham to Letitia Phelps, the same year. Mr. Bonham moved to Rochester and was a merchant there.
In the winter of 1856-57 a daughter of Benjamin Roberts, in going from a neighboring farm in a severe blizzard, was lost and her body was found frozen to death against a fence a couple of days afterward.
The township was organized in 1858. John Case was the first chairman of supervisors, and E. F. Fry the first clerk.
The population of the township, according to the state census of 1905, was 672.
The pioneers of Marion were quiet and orderly people and there was not the frontier roughness there that is imagined to accompany the opening of a new country, but in 1860 some of them allowed their zeal for law and order to lead them into lawlessness. A valu- able watch belonging to a Mr. Rutan was reported stolen, and a German laborer was suspected of the crime, but denied it. Half a dozen of the most respectable citizens, to extort a confession, strung him up to the limb of a tree and almost executed him, but without securing the confession. The executioners were bound over to the grand jury, but that body failed to indict them. It was reported that they got the main witness against them, the laborer, so drunk that he was useless as a witness. Later public opinion was that the watch had not been stolen.
The death of John A. Howard, a veteran of the War of the Rebellion, occurred in October, 1876, under peculiar circumstances. There had been horse stealing in the neighborhood and some colts of John Mayhew, a neighbor, had been put into the barn with Mr. Howard's horses; for greater safety. A son of Mr. Mayhew and a son of Mr. Howard secreted themselves in the barn, with firearms, to guard the horses. Near midnight Mr. Howard, thinking he
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heard a noise in the barn, went there, and, opening the door, was shot in the neck by young Mayhew, and died the second day after.
Marion Village .- In the fall of 1854 Alfred Kinney opened a store about a mile east of where the village now is, and in a year moved it to the village, going into partnership with James D. Graff, who came from Freeport, Illinois. Stores were also started by Ansel C. Rodgers, Curtis & Dudley and Clark & Moulton. Charles H. Morrill, a native of New York state, came from Winona, and, buying out A. P. Moulton, became a partner with Gardner Clark in 1856, and afterward bought out Clark, and later sold to John H. Fawcett, a farmer of Marion township, and moved to Rochester, where he became a leading grocer. Mr. Fawcett was the village merchant for years, and was postmaster thirty-five years in suc- cession. George W. Root, later a Rochester groceryman, was his partner for a time. Mr. Fawcett sold to Horace Willis in 1900 and moved to Stewartville, where he is now living. Dr. C. E. Fawcett, of Stewartville, and Dr. A. C. Fawcett, a dentist of Rochester, are his sons.
The first blacksmith was Leonard Chase, and the first wagon- maker John Strangeway. Aaron Hill, a blacksmith, came in 1856. Dr. J. C. Cole was the first physician.
The Marion postoffice was established at the village in 1856, and L. G. Dudley was appointed postmaster. He moved to Rochester.
The Methodist Episcopal church was organized in 1855 by Rev. Benjamin Criss, whose circuit extended from Brownsville, on the Mississippi, to the northern part of Olmsted county; and he trav- eled it on foot through the timber and wading streams. A church building was erected in 1859. It was burned down in 1868, but was at once rebuilt.
The Church of Christ was organized in the village in 1866 by Rev. Levan, who preached there and at Pleasant Grove several years, making his home much of the time in Rochester.
The Baptist and Disciples' churches built a place of worship together in 1872. It cost $1,000 and was all paid for.
There are now two churches in the village-the Methodist and Christian.
The village grew and bade fair to become one of the largest towns in the county till, in 1857, the election contest between it and Roch- ester, for the county seat, resulted in favor of the latter. The two places are only eight miles apart, and the advantage thus gained by Rochester, and the fact that Marion has no railroad, has retarded its growth. The railroad station of Predmore is only a mile and a half from Marion village, just far enough away to kill the old vil- lage, but has not yet done so. The railroad did not go to the vil- lage; it remains to be seen whether the village will go to the railroad.
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Predmore .- A station on the Winona & Southwestern Railroad, built through the county in 1891, was located in the southeast corner of Marion township and called Predmore, the name of a family of original settlers in the neighborhood. It is a small village of only one .store, a blacksmith shop and a few buildings. A creamery was established a couple of years after the station was located, and is still in successful operation.
Chester .- About 1868 Chester station was established on the Winona & St. Peter Railroad, in the northeast part of the township. An elevator was built and Ezra La Claire was appointed the first postmaster. Till about 1885 it was a thriving village, and had at one time 125 or 130 inhabitants. A great deal of grain was bought there; one day in September, 1872, 1,450 bushels of wheat were taken in at the elevator. Loren B. Parker kept the elevator and a store several years. He moved away about 1880, and is now in Colorado. O. T. Caswell, from Winona, was the station agent, grain buyer and storekeeper about ten years. The business has dwindled and it is now a village of seven or eight houses, with a postoffice, school house and store.
There has always been rivalry between Chester and Marion vil- lages as to which should be the political capital of the township, and the town elections have been held sometimes at one place and some- times at the other. They are only about four miles apart.
NEW HAVEN TOWNSHIP ( Township 108 North, Range 15 West) .- The first settler in this township was Matthias C. Van Horn, who came from Iowa to Oronoco in the spring of 1854, and, pushing beyond, on foot, found a location on the Zumbro river where he made his claim, built a log house and, the next season, brought his family. He died in 1895. Park Amsden settled the same season. In August of the same year Samuel Brink came from Iowa with eight teams and eighteen men, all of whom took timber claims and sold out to Brink. History repeats itself but slowly. This was more than fifty years ago, and the government has only within a few years begun prosecuting millionaire miners, lumber- men and ranchers in the far West for following Brink's humble example. He started the town of Durango on the river, built a saw mill and a store in partnership with John Holmes. Brink moved to Lake Chetek and Holmes sold to Charles Nye and in 1857, on the death of Nye, Daniel Heaney, of Rochester, became the proprietor of the store and mill. John H. Hill, afterward a druggist in Roch- ester, was postmaster. In 1858 the name of the hamlet was changed to New Haven, the name also given to the township. The store was closed, the dam went out, and the embryo city collapsed about 1864 and is now a farm owned by John Cornwell, who was for years
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a prominent citizen of the township, but is now a resident of Owatonna.
The first boards sawed at the Durango mill were used in building houses for Abram Clason, who settled in the township in 1854, and for Daniel Salley, who settled in 1855.
Among the laborers digging the race for Brink was Barney Mc- Ginley. He remained in the neighborhood and in 1868 settled on a farm in the township.
John and William Kilroy, J. N. Palmer, C. Colgrove, Amos But- ton and Philo Phelps also came in 1854.
In 1855 John B. Bassett and son, Joshua B. Bassett, Joseph and John Cornwell, Cornelius White, Edward P. Reynolds, Charles W. Osborn, William W. Button, A. Clason, F. W. Cornwell and P. Kennedy and a number of others made claims.
In 1856 settlements were made by James H. Hodgman, Walter Martin, Daniel Jewell, Samuel Campbell, A. O. Cowles, R. Elliott and Herman Frost.
The first child born in the township was Bertha E., daughter of William Kilroy, in March, 1855.
The first death was of Mrs. Helen Madison, wife of Henry Madi- son, in August, 1856. She was under twenty-one years of age. The first couple married were John Holmes and Miss Diana Phelps, in the spring of 1855.
In 1857 the county commissioners changed the boundaries of New Haven and Oronoco by setting off three sections in the north- east corner of the former township and attaching them to Oronoco. The Zumbro river runs across that corner. This loss of territory was acquiesced in by the people of New Haven till 1866, when, as the result of a suit in the district court, it was decided that the action of the commissioners had been illegal, and the territory was restored to New Haven.
The township was organized in May, 1858. At the town meet- ing, held at Heaney's store, the following officers were elected: Supervisors. John Loury, chairman; Daniel Salley, Thomas Mc- Manus; clerk, John Cornwell; assessor, J. H. Hodgman; overseer of poor, Arnold Hunter; collector and treasurer, A. N. Bowman; justices, A. B. Chapin, L. S. Howe; constables, Charles Osborn and A. N. Bowman. John Cornwell was re-elected clerk every year during his residence there. There were eighty-one votes cast at the first election, and Daniel Salley cast the first vote.
New Haven was the only township in the county that voted against the $5,000,000 loan of state credit to the railroads in the election of 1858.
Several saw mills were built in this township. In 1855 Baker & Mattison built one only about a mile above Brink's, which was
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bought a couple of years later by James Button, and conducted suc- cessfully by him for several years. He later moved to Rochester.
This township was originally the most heavily timbered in the county, about two-thirds of it having been forest. Most of the building timber of the early settlers came from it and Kalmar township.
A postoffice was established in 1862 within a mile of the west line of the township and county, and named Othello. The Postoffice Department required the mail to be carried from Mantorville with- out expense to the government, and David Rowley did that favor to his neighbors once a week till the government felt rich enough to establish a service of its own three times a week. Almeron O. Cowles was the first postmaster. After ten years he resigned in favor of William Porter, who died in about a year, and Mrs. Cor- nelius White, the wife of a pioneer and veteran soldier, was ap- pointed. She did faithful and poorly paid duty for years, and resigned in 1902. The office is now among the things that were.
The state census of 1905 states the population of the township as 878.
For years the woods from Kalmar and New Haven to Pine Island were the resort, in the early summer, of wild pigeons which nested there. Every morning and afternoon, during the breeding season, flocks of the birds could be seen for miles around, leaving and returning to their nests, and the Genoa woods were raided ruth- lessly by hunters from the surrounding country. The pot-hunters shipped the birds and their squabs in bags and barrels to Chicago and other markets, and the breaking up of their nests and the thin- ning of the timber for fuel destroyed the homes of the birds, and the pigeon roosts are no more.
Genoa .- A saw mill was built in 1856 at the location known as Genoa, by Mapes, Baker & Frycke. In 1857 another one was built in the same vicinity by Charles Chapin & Son. In 1863 John Kilroy and Leonard W. Kilbourn built a larger steam mill, which was burned down in 1864 and rebuilt. In 1869 Joshua Bassett built a steam saw mill. All the mills did a good business till the bringing in of pine lumber by railroad destroyed the market for native lumber. Ira Richards opened the first store in 1863, and J. L. Bassett started one in 1864, and Hiram Miller in 1865. The village of Genoa was platted by John B. Bassett in 1865. A large and well-built school house is the principal institution of Genoa.
ORION TOWNSHIP (Township 105 North, Range 12 West). -The first settlements in this township were made in 1854 by George M. Gere, John Schermerhorn, Joel Ballard, David Hazelton, James Edwards, C. J. Robinson, Henry Goodman and Joseph Rose.
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Stephen and Cassius L. Case, brothers, and Lowell B. Bliss made claims the same year and settled with their families in 1855.
Francis H. Cummings, Thomas Harris, Franklin B. Burk, Levi Lovejoy and Lemuel Denny came in 1855. Mr. Cummings built a saw mill and platted a town that he called Cummingsville. The mill ran only a few years and the village failed to develop. The same year Thomas Harris built a steam mill which had a short life. Mr. Harris went into the army and ceased to be a resident of the township. F. G. Tesca, Daniel Hisey, John H., Joseph and Amos Plank, E. Monette and W. F. Seymour pre-empted in 1856.
The first birth in the township was of Edward, son of F. H. Blodget, born in June. 1854. The first death was of John Schermer- horn, in October, 1855. The first marriage was of O. H. Chapman to Miss Eliza Schermerhorn, in November, 1854.
The first school was taught in 1856 by Andrew Beardsley, at the home of Mahlon Clayton. A school house was built the same year and the first to teach in it was Miss Deming.
The first sermon was preached in the house of Stephen Case, in the fall of 1855, by Rev. George Stevenson, a Methodist.
The township was organized in 1858. At the first town meeting Thomas Harris was moderator, and Richard S. Russell, Thomas Harris, B. F. McVey and L. B. Bliss, judges of election. The first township officers elected were: Supervisors, L. B. Bliss, chairman; Stephen Case, Seth A. Cole; clerk, John T. Hancock; collector, Henry Goodman; overseer of poor, F. H. Cummings; justices, Thomas Harris and F. B. Burk; constables, Henry Goodman and M. L. Scarbrough.
John T. Hancock held the offices of town clerk and justice of the peace more than thirty years continuously. He wrote a most beau- tiful, old style, round hand.
Stephen Case was one of the committee that named the township. It was first called Salem, which was changed to Orion.
The Orion flouring mill was built in 1866 by Christopher Ecker, who sold it to William Hueston in 1874. It was burned down in 1879 and rebuilt by Mr. Hueston, with three run of stones, run by water power.
There is a creamery, with M. B. Chapman as the buttermaker.
A town hall was built in 1894 and dedicated by a dance.
The population of the township, as given in the state census of 1905, was 669.
That mysterious place called "Devil's Den" is supposed to be located in this township.
ORONOCO TOWNSHIP (Township 108 North, Range 14 West) .- Leonard B. Hodges, while engaged in southern Minnesota as a deputy United States surveyor, obtained knowledge of the site
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of Oronoco, with its great advantages for the building of a city, and, with John B. Clark and Ebenezer S. Collins, came from Iowa and located there March 13, 1854. The nearest other settlements were Cannon Falls, thirty-five miles away, and Red Wing and Faribault, forty miles. They built a log cabin and kept bachelors' hall and spent the season in developing the future city, raising a crop and clearing a road through the timber for M. O. Walker's stage line from Dubuque to St. Paul. They platted the village and donated the mill site, the best in the county, to Ezra Odell and James Hol- liston, who built a saw mill. In 1855 Dorman J. Bascomb, T. A. Olmsted and H. D. Evans built a grist mill and in 1856 Allott & Wilson built a planing and sash mill, which was carried away by the freshet of 1859. Robert K. Whiteley, from St. Louis, and John A. Moore, from New York, were the next settlers. E. C. Stevens moved with his family from Red Wing to the village in 1854, and they were the first family to settle there. A log house was built in 1854 by S. P. Hicks and fed and sheltered from sixty to a hun- dred men. Reuben Ottman, the first lawyer, came to the village in the winter of 1854-55 and made investments in real estate. Newell Bascomb and Samuel Withrow came to the village in 1855, and Thomas C. Clay, Simeon R. Terwilliger and John McMaster in 1856.
Capt. James George and his brother-in-law, Michael Pierce, J. D. Terry, Lewis L. Herrick, Amasa S. Gary, Alvin Brockway, William B. Webster, Amosa and Sobieski Moulton and Abram M. Moulton, a Mexican war veteran, and Lyman S. Crowell settled on farms in 1855, and George Atkinson, Richard Waterman and Elisha Gorton in 1856.
The first store was opened in 1854 by John B. Clark and John A. Moore, and one the next season by Samuel Withrow and H. D. Evans.
Small parties of Chippewa and Sioux Indians were frequently camped about the village in its earliest days, and Mrs. Hodges remembers a camp of two or three hundred the first season-prob- ably attracted by the good fishing. They were perfectly friendly.
J. B. Clark, one of the trio of original townsite proprietors, tiring of the loneliness of their bachelor existence and lamenting that there was no woman in the rapidly growing settlement, made it known that he would give a lot to the first woman who would visit Oronoco. A Miss Stevens, living in the neighborhood of Pine Island, came down with her brother, and got the lot. We do not learn that she lived on it. She probably took it as a speculation.
The first birth recorded in the township was of Ida, daughter of J. B. Clark. The first marriage was of James Holliston to Mary Stephenson. The first death was of William McVeigh, a mill-
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wright, who died in May, 1855. The first school was taught by Miss Sarah Pierce.
The first meeting of the board of county commissioners was held at Oronoco in the spring of 1855.
The township was organized in 1858, and L. B. Hodges was elected chairman of supervisors and John McMaster town clerk. W. C. Buttles was elected town treasurer. Times were hard and many settlers very poor, and Mr. Buttles, finding that the office required him to levy on the only cow or other property that the poorest taxpayers could not spare, he gave up the distasteful polit- ical job and resigned the office. Though still living, he ought to have a monument.
The population of the township, according to the state census of 1905, was 654.
In 1855 and 1856 there was every prospect that Oronoco would be the leading town and the county seat of the county, and it was settled rapidly and prospered.
The first newspaper in the county was the Oronoco Courier, first issued in December, 1856, by a company consisting of Leonard B. Hodges, John B. Clark, Ebenezer S. Collins, Reuben Ottman and E. Allen Power. The printing material was brought from Dubuque. Dr. Hector Galloway, the first physician of the village, was editor- in-chief, and E. Allen (Ned) Power, local editor. John R. Flynn, of Dubuque, was foreman of the office. It was issued weekly, and ably edited, and lasted about a year. The financial panic of 1857 killed it.
The Oronoco Journal was published as a personal advertising enterprise by Capt. M. W. McClay, about a year from May, 1880.
The Oronoco News was started by E. O. Hickox in 1897. It was published successfully for a few years, after which it changed ownership frequently, and was discontinued in 1907, leaving the town without a paper.
The discovery and mining of gold are narrated in another chapter of this work.
The first church in the village was built by the Disciples in 1865. It was allowed to become useless, and in 1871 a neat edifice was built by the Presbyterians, and has been used also by other denom- inations. The German Lutherans have within a few years past built a pretty church. The corner-stone of St. John's German Lutheran church was laid in June, 1908.
The most prominent feature of the village is its school house, erected in 1875. It is of brick, two stories in height, and has four ample schoolrooms, and is on a very sightly location.
A handsome and substantial iron bridge spans the river on the entrance to the village from the south. It was built in 1866.
A camp has been established on the bank of Lake Shady, opposite
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the village, where for several summers past small colonies of patients from the Insane Hospital at Rochester have enjoyed vacations.
The water power and mill at Oronoco were bought in 1863 by Abraham D. Allis, in partnerhip with George W. Wirt. Mr. Allis is a native of the state of New York, was a California pioneer in 1849, and moved from there to Waupun, Wisconsin, and engaged in the manufacture of wagons. He bought out the interest of Mr. Wirt in the mill and enlarged and improved it, and in 1873 took A. Gooding and D. S. Hibbard, of Rochester, as partners, and built a large mill with eight run of stones, which did a very successful business till November, 1879, when it was burned down, with 30,000 bushels of wheat, at a loss of $90,000. Mr. Allis since that has conducted the business alone, rebuilding the mill on a smaller scale. He has also developed a summer resort. The mill pond has been named Lake Allis; pavilions and cottages have been built; the lake has been furnished with boats, and the grounds, which are very picturesque, are the resort in the warm weather of daily picnic parties from Rochester and other places, and some persons have built cottages and spend the summer there. It has been the summer residence of Drs. W. J. and C. H. Mayo for several years past.
Deaths by drowning have been frequent in the waters of the Zumbro near the mills. Edie, a young son of Alfred G. Lawyer, one of the early settlers, was the first victim. A four-year-old son of John Irish was also drowned. John and Alden Hill, young men and brothers, were drowned by breaking through the ice of the pond. Two little children of Arthur Nichols, a boy and a girl, were drowned in October, 1878. A young man named Rose was drowned in May, 1880. In June of the same year Dr. John N. Farrand, the village physician, was capsized in a boat while fishing, and drowned. Michael A. Reid, principal of the village school, was drowned in June, 1900, while swimming with two of his scholars.
Both the Chicago & Northwestern and the Chicago Great West- ern Railroads, in building from Rochester to St. Paul, avoided Oro- noco, running through New Haven township and establishing switches and small depots called Oronoco station, located in New Haven, about three miles west of the village of Oronoco, though of but little value to that place.
The population of the village by the state census of 1905 was 196.
The failure to obtain railroad communication with the world has prevented Oronoco village from becoming the city that nature fitted it for. The water power is the best in all this region, and there are within a short distance two other excellent but undeveloped powers. Unless electricity shall be superseded by some as yet undiscovered power (and who knows?), it may some day be an important elec- trical center. It has great electrical potentiality.
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PLEASANT GROVE TOWNSHIP (Township 105 North, Range 13 West) .- The first settlement in the county is believed to have been that of Jacob Goss, who made claim in this township in the spring of 1853, and lived on it till 1854, when he sold to Mrs. Pattridge, who, with her sons, was among the earliest settlers. There also came to this township in 1854 Philo S. Curtis, Y. P. Burgan, David and Robert Overend, Nathan S. Phelps, Joseph L. Parks, Jesse Bag- ley, Robert Angus, John B. Hendricks, Barnard Denny and others. In 1855 locations were made by M. Brittendall, O. H. Page, Robert Tait, Lindsley Flathers, Robert Overend, John Lambert, John and William Burch, Joseph Prentice, J. D. Bunce, W. H. Mills, E. D. and Samuel Barrows, John and Martin Kinney, Fred- erick Sibeck, Thomas S. Harris, Erven H. Stuckman, David Ber- nard and Welcome A. Geer. In 1856 Richard Russell and Herbert G. McCaleb came.
The first child born in the township was Minnesota, daughter of John Collins. The first death was of an old man named Holmes. The first couple to wed were Marvin Harwood and a daughter of Benjamin Winans.
The first school was taught by Miss Susan Rucker. The first sermon was preached at the house of Y. P. Burgan, by Rev. Christ, a Methodist.
The township was organized in 1858, with the following officers : Supervisors, J. H. Hartenbower, chairman; E. H. Stuckman, F. L. Stevens; clerk, W. H. Mills: assessor, H. G. McCaleb; justices, Samuel Barrows, I. W. Norton; collector, William Kennedy; con- stables, William Kennedy, J. S. Stevens; overseer of poor, John Collins.
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