Welcome to Minnesota

I didn’t have any history destinations in mind for last week’s long bike ride, other than The Banks of Plum Creek at the end. But now that I’m home I like to learn what I can about some of the places where I took photos.

This one is at the border with Minnesota. The road here turns to the right (east) to follow the border.

View larger map

I had made a bad guess in coming to this border. I could have saved about five miles, including three miles into the ESE wind, if I had known that one of the other north-south roads was paved all the way to the border.

The soybean field in the photo is at the northwest corner of Section 11 in Fairview Township, Osceola County. The map above, where the site of the photo is shown by a red dot, is from the 1914 history of Osceola County, following page 556. The GLO land patent database has no records for Section 11 to tell us who first bought the land, but that’s probably because Section 11 wasn’t sold through the Land Office. The same county history says (page 556) “The northeastern portion of this township was unsettled for a number of years. It was held by speculators and the railroad company…” Presumably this means the land had been awarded by the national government to a railroad to help pay for the construction. Whether it was a piece of the railroad that once crossed a corner of Section 12, I don’t know.

Settlers often complained that railroads and land-grant colleges would hold on to their land, waiting for the sale value to go up. Since they weren’t doing anything to improve their land, this had a depressing effect on the local economy and on the value of the land taken by nearby settlers. I’m currently reading some Paul Wallace Gates articles about how these conflicts played out. I’m hoping for some new bicycle destinations from these articles, but it’s also interesting to learn how these conflicts may have involved places I have already ridden to.