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Date Modified: 06/17/2008 3:54 PM
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By Greg Sellnow
On Aug. 22, 1883, Rochester Mayor Samuel Whitten sent
this telegram to Gov. Lucius Hubbard:
“Rochester is in ruins. Twenty-four people are killed. Over 40 are seriously injured. One-third of the city laid to waste.
We need immediate help.”
A tornado, some say two tornadoes that merged into one angry cloud just north of town, had cut a mile-wide swath through the fast-growing city of 10,000 the evening before. The twister flattened an entire quadrant of the city, known as Lower
Town, in the vicinity of the current Northrop education building. Dozens of businesses were damaged, many beyond repair, and more than 200 people were left homeless.
Three days after the tornado, more than 1,000 townspeople gathered at Oakwood Cemetery to lay 10 of the victims to rest.
There was no music, just a few somber words of committal for each of the bodies put into the ground.
A reporter for the Rochester Post ended his description of the ceremony with this: “The only tributes left upon the close
clinging clay were silent scalding tears.”
For the second time in Rochester’s 29-year history, the community found itself at a crossroads. It could allow itself to retract. The residents could clean up the mess, patch up the damaged businesses as best they could and allow those without homes or jobs to move north to St. Paul, east to Winona or west to Mankato.
Or it could be aggressive, try to come up with imaginative ways to finance a massive rebuilding effort and keep thecity’s work force from migrating to nearby communities.
The city, under the leadership of aneclectic cadre of frontier lawyers, doctors and businessmen from Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana and parts east who’d chosen to make Rochester their adopted home, chose option two.
A commitment to rebuild
Just as they had done after 1857 — when the bottom fell out of the U.S. economy, putting a temporary halt to westward migration into Minnesota and Dakota territories — Rochester leaders found a way to keep the city from shriveling up. Together, they would not only rebuild the storm-ravaged community, but help it grow, diversify and evolve into one of the largest and most prosperous cities in the upper Midwest. They would lay the foundation for Rochester to become a major national, and even international, destination for those in need of sophisticated medical care.
Their backgrounds were as diverse as the topography on which the city was first mapped 150 years ago.
Among them were:
• A baker from Wisconsin, by way of Rochester, N.Y., who would be credited with founding the city and establishing its first business.
• An intellectual attorney and businessman, who during the city’s formative years would serve it in nearly every government and judicial capacity possible.
• A town jeweler, who would fashion rings from tiny nuggets mined during a brief gold rush that would bring dozens of speculators to Rochester in the 1860s.
• A brilliant, self-taught lawyer who would go on to become a world-famous diplomat and win a Nobel Prize.
• And a tough, well-traveled country doctor from England, who would help build a hospital in Rochester and, with the help of his two sons, create one of the largest and most renowned medical practices in the world.
Rochester grew quickly after founder George Head dragged a log behind a team of oxen to clear brush for its first street, Broadway Avenue. After sheltering just seven families in the winter of 1854, the population had grown to nearly 10,000 within a decade.
Territorial disputes
However, before 1850 few whites ventured into southeastern Minnesota. Except for the occasional French fur trader or missionary, the Ojibwa and Dakota Indians were the only humans to live or wander through southeastern Minnesota for centuries.
Explorers and traders ventured into the territory at their own risk. The two Indian nations didn’t get along, maintaining a bloody territorial feud for the better part of a century. Travelers who happened into these lands risked ambush by warriors
who might mistake them for the enemy or want to rob them of their furs or food. Eventually the Dakota took over the southern half of the state, forcing the Ojibwa to settle in the northern forests of what is now Minnesota.
Some Dakota tribes eventually made their way west into Dakota Territory, following the buffalo herds that had migrated there, along with elk and other game species that once populated southern Minnesota prairies.
The first whites in this region of the state were likely French fur traders who began moving through Minnesota in the mid-1600s. The French controlled the region until 1763, when a British victory in the French and Indian War meant that France had to give up its claim on the Northwest Territories. Control over the Minnesota territory was divided between England (east of the Mississippi) and Spain (west of the Mississippi).
In 1800, Spain returned control of the Louisiana Territory, which included two-thirds of Minnesota, to France. Napoleon,
his country strapped for cash and fearing its arch imperialistic rival England might attempt to take control of the land, sold
the 800,000 square miles of Louisiana Territory to the fledgling U. S. government for the bargain-basement price of $15 million.
Explorations
President Thomas Jefferson soon dispatched an expedition led by Merriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the country’s new western territory and find a waterway passage to the Pacific Ocean. He sent a second group of explorers, led by a 26-year-old Army lieutenant named Zebulon Pike, to locate the source of the Mississippi River, find out what the British were up to in this part of the new world, and acquire land from the Indians for military outposts.
Pike never found the true source of the Mississippi. But he did negotiate the purchase of some tribal lands from the
Dakota. His most significant acquisition was a plot of land at the junction of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers where the U.S. government later established what would become
the region’s major military hub for the next century.
The post, named Fort Snelling after one of it first commanding officers, served as safe harbor for traders, missionaries,
trappers, steamboat travelers and French Canadian squatters. The homes and small businesses that sprang up around the fort after it was built in 1819 would establish the foundation for the territory’s first city, St. Paul.
Meanwhile, the land south of St. Paul remained mostly unexplored. The War of 1812 between the United States and England had purged the region of British soldiers and speculators, but the presence of the Dakota rendered the land mostly unavailable to whites.
There is evidence that the Ojibwa, and later the Dakota, traveled through the land on which Rochester sits, where they likely hunted, fished and set up overnight camps before heading back to more permanent villages along the Mississippi.
When Indians were the only humans roaming what is now Olmsted County it was mostly prairie, covered by thick, waist high grasses and tangles of vines and brush. Along the region’s rivers and streams, the grasses gave way to tall
stands of hardwood trees such as oak, maple, hickory and aspen.
The Indians didn’t view what would become Olmsted County as prime encampment territory. That’s probably because the Zumbro River, whose name was derived from a mangled derivation of a French word meaning “river of obstructions,” was too narrow and shallow at many points to be navigated by canoe.
Land shows promise
But government surveyors and speculators saw it differently. The region had rich soil that was ideal for farming. The Zumbro River provided a reliable water supply and power source for mills. And it was nicely situated among established cities such as St. Paul, Mankato and Winona.
But the Indians were an impediment to settlement, not only of the Minnesota Territory but of many other parts of the country. Thus, the U.S. government began its long, systematic process of removing Indians from tribal lands.
The gates that held back settlement of southeastern Minnesota were opened in 1851, when territorial officials negotiated two treaties with the Dakota in which the Indians agreed to cede 24 million acres of land to the government for the scandalous price of just more than $3 million. The Indians saw little of the money. Most of it went to fur traders who put claims on the cash, contending it was owed them for the supplies they’d provided the Indians.
By the time the first settlers arrived in what is now Rochester in 1854, all but a few straggling bands of Indians had moved out of the region and onto a long, pencil-shaped reservation that straddled the Minnesota River.
According to a history of the city written in 1883, the last Indians to spend time near Rochester were in a band of about
200 Dakotas who, in late fall and winter of 1854-55, camped on the outskirts of town. Four of them died, probably of smallpox, and they were buried on a ridge now known as Indian Heights Park in northwest Rochester near Assisi Heights. During the winter three more Indians died, including the band’s chief, and they were laid to rest in the same burial
grounds. In spring, the Indians left, never to return to this part of the state. Farther west, however, a final, violent chapter in
the history of our state’s uneasy relationship between white territorial settlers and the Indians remained to be written.
Rochester is born
The first person to stake a property claim in what is now Rochester is believed to be a land surveyor from Winona named Thomas Simpson. He built a small shanty of rock and sod along the banks of the Zumbro in spring 1854 and left. When he returned weeks later, he discovered that someone had jumped his claim, a common practice in the nation’s expansionist years, and torn down the shanty.
During the next few months, several families arrived in the region to stake their land claims.
Among them was a New Yorker named George Head, who came here with his wife, Henrietta; his father, John; and a brother, Jonathan, on July 12, 1954. Born in England, Head had emigrated with his family to New York when he was a young boy. The family later moved to Wisconsin, where George was employed as a baker. But like many young Americans of the era, he struck out for new, unsettled territory
in the West where, newspaper ads touted, there was fertile land to be had and money to be made.
After resolving a claim dispute with a Winona man, Edward S. Smith, that local historians say involved a revolver and some $3,600 in cash, Head built a log cabin near what is now Broadway and Fourth Street.
Just days after arriving here, Head laid out the boundaries of the new community and cleared its first street. He said he named the town Rochester because the area reminded him of his hometown.
City fleshes out
By 1855, a stage line had begun service through Rochester, and the city became a stopping point for drivers along a narrow primitive road to rest and water their horses. The road, called the Dubuque Trail, led travelers from northern Iowa to the territorial capital of St. Paul. The trail roughly followed the path of what is now U.S. 52. Given the city’s accessibility to a
stage line, and Head’s announced intentions to establish a full-fledged city here, settlers began to arrive by the dozens in
the spring and summer of 1855.
Houses quickly went up. Farmland was cleared. Businesses were established.
Head built a second cabin, which he sold to another man for use as a tavern and rooming house. Head, in turn, started a general merchandise business.
“George Head, Head’s Block, corner of Main and College Streets, second door East of Main just received his stock of Fall and Winter goods,” reads an ad from the Nov. 26, 1859, issue of the Rochester Post. After a listing of some of the goods available at the store, there is this addendum. “P.S. German, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish spoken at our store.”
Rochester’s first school was built in 1856. That same year, the city’s first doctor, Martin T. Perrine, set up shop. He was followed by a second physician, Hector Galloway. A courthouse was constructed in 1858, the year Congress finally accorded Minnesota statehood. A jeweler set up shop, so did a blacksmith. A brewery was built, and flour mills were constructed along the Zumbro. In just four years, Rochester had become a full-fledged city.
A bump, a rush in the road
The city and state suffered a setback in 1857 when the national economy went south and folks quit migrating west. Businessmen such as Head and local farmers found ways to make ends meet despite a lack of growth, and the city quickly picked up where it had left off when the economy improved and settlers resumed westward settlement and expansion.
Contributing to Rochester’s population boom in the late 1850s was the discovery of gold in the Zumbro River near Oronoco.
Dozens of prospectors surged into Rochester in the summer of 1858 to pan for the valuable treasure in the Zumbro, which was rumored to be yielding nuggets as big as some of those found in California during the first months of the California gold rush a decade earlier. But the rumors were never confirmed. Although some Rochester investors established a mining company and set up an elaborate system of sluices on the Zumbro, prospectors had only meager success.
No one got rich during the brief rush, but enough gold was found for Rochester’s town jeweler, Eleazor Damon, to fashion a few rings. In spring 1859, a torrent of heavy rain washed the sluice system away, and the disillusioned investors decided not to rebuild. The gold rush was over almost as quickly as it had begun.
Despite the end of the gold rush, Rochester continued to prosper, but trouble was brewing on the national scene.
Battle over slavery
“We are entering upon a year that will be memorable in the annals of American politics,” an editorial in the Chicago Tribune and reprinted in the Rochester Post said in the fall of 1859. “The year that will witness, we trust, the election of a Republican president and the national triumph of Republican principles. The great issues to be submitted to a jury of the whole people are these: Shall slavery be extended and protected by the federal government? Shall the public domain — the free territories of the nation, be surrendered to the blighting intrusion of slavery?”
Shortly after war was declared in 1861, Gov. Alexander Ramsey pledged 1,000 Minnesota troops to the Union cause. But by 1862, the number of volunteers began to flag, and President Lincoln requested a draft of 300,000 men nationwide.
The task of getting soldiers examined, enrolled and outfitted for combat was a daunting one. Among those enlisted to help was a 43-year-old English-born doctor living in LeSueur named William Worrall Mayo. He was selected to be examining surgeon for his home county’s enrollment board. The new federal job came at a good time for Mayo. Doctors in frontier days made little money on house calls, and he did everything from veterinary work to farming and driving a river
ferry to supplement his meager income.
Mayo was only months into his military assignment when a distraction even more ominous than the war between the states being fought to the east and south of Minnesota presented itself in summer 1862.
The Dakota Conflict
On the Sioux reservation, which ran from New Ulm to the South Dakota border along the Minnesota River, the Indians had grown impatient with the U.S. government. Their crops had failed, and the Dakotas were hungry. By winter, many Indians were starving.
Yet, the federal government refused to release stockpiles of food that had been locked away on the reservation. The Indians were also frustrated that annual payments from the federal government were late. They couldn’t buy food from local traders, and the traders refused to extend them any more credit.
Tensions on the reservation reached the boiling point in August 1862 when tribal leaders met with government officials and local traders.
Dakota Chief Little Crow asked why government food stockpiles couldn’t be released, and he threatened: “When men are hungry, they help themselves.”One of the traders, Andrew Myrick, responded: “So far as I am concerned, if they are hungry let them eat grass.”
Little Crow had had enough. The bloody Dakota Conflict of 1862 began on Aug. 17 and continued for five weeks. One of its first victims was Myrick. When he found him, Myrick’s brother discovered two bullet holes in his body. His mouth had
been stuffed with grass.
The Indians attacked farms, villages, government outposts and communities. One-third of the city of New Ulm was destroyed in two attacks.
People in cities such as LeSueur and Rochester armed themselves, formed citizen militias and braced for attack. The
uprising was finally put down by thousands of federal troops in late September.
Historians disagree on how many settlers were killed in the uprising, but Lincoln put the estimate at 800. In the end, 39
Indians were hanged in Mankato for their involvement in the raids.
In a practice common for the day, local doctors exhumed some of the corpses of the executed Indians from shallow graves and used them for medical study.
William Worrall Mayo selected the corpse of a chief named Cut Nose and kept the Indian’s bones in his medical office for years.
The Mayo legacy
In 1863, as the Civil War raged on, Mayo was named examining surgeon for the entire southern half of the state, a position that required him to move to Rochester. It would be the last move Mayo, who had lived in at least eight communities in six states since emigrating from England in 1845, would make.
Mayo was removed from his post after government officials determined that he had taken payment for private examinations of prospective soldiers, many of whom the doctor had determined were unfit to serve.
The scandal attracted statewide attention, but it did not end up damaging Mayo’s medical career. He built a home on what is now Second Street Southwest and established a practice on Third Street in downtown Rochester.
William Worrall and Louise Mayo’s second son, Charles, was born in that house in 1865 as the war was ending. Their first son,William, had been born in LeSueur just as the war was getting under way.
By the time Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered in the spring of 1865, about 1,250 Olmsted County residents -
more than a 10th of the county’s population - had served in the Union Army.
They served primarily with Company B of the Second Regiment of Minnesota Volunteers. They fought at the battle of Mill Spring in Kentucky, Chickamauga and Missionary Ridge in Georgia, and took part in Gen. Sherman’s “March to the Sea.”
About 250 troops from Olmsted County are believed to have been killed in that war.
By the time the Mayos decided to put down roots in Rochester, the community of about 3,000 had become one of the state’s fastest-growing cities, attracting hundreds of European immigrants and land-seekers from the East.
Ag-driven economy
While the community had a thriving business core and a growing cadre of professionals, agriculture would drive the city’s economy for most of its first century.
Wheat had become the state’s top cash crop, and Rochester, bolstered by the extension of the Winona and St. Peter Railroad into the city in 1864, was a southern wheat hub.
A large grain elevator had been built here, and three mills, powered by water from the Zumbro, were operating in the city by the 1860s.
A correspondent for the St. Paul Press described Rochester during a train trip in this 1866 dispatch:
“As we glide onward over the undulating prairie, passing a creek here and a rivulet there, farms succeed farms and so continue for the 50 miles ahead until we reach Rochester. It would be hard to express the beauty, wealth or fertility of this section of our state. Look in what direction you may the landscape is dotted with neat farmhouses and enclosed fields. I saw a number of healthy looking orchards, many of them in fall bloom.
"... This town is in the central wheat market of the south section of the state. Mr. Atkins, the superintendent of the (rail)road, informed me that he now brings forward for shipment about 18,000 bushels daily. The train upon which I
returned brought 23 cars so heavily loaded as to require the assistance of a second locomotive.”
The city had made such a name for itself by the 1860s that it was selected to host the Minnesota State Fair, which used
to rotate to different locations, in 1866, 1867, 1869 and 1882.
Among the items on display at the 1866 fair were 23 cross plows, eight seed drills, seven washing machines and wringers, four butter churns, a vegetable steamer, six yokes of working cattle and a bust of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant carved in marble.
Cast of characters
Rochester’s orderly growth through its first 50 years was due in part to its visionary leaders. In addition to the earlier mentioned George Head and William Worrall Mayo they included:
• Hotelier and dry goods store owner John Cook.
• Mill owner and prominent businessman Thomas Fishback.
• A saddler named John Crane who was known as much for his hunting skills (he once killed six prairie chickens with one shot) as his business acumen.
• Lawyer James George, who volunteered for service in the Civil War and quickly advanced through the ranks to the
position of colonel. He lost 40 percent of the company he commanded at the Battle of Chickamauga.
• Woolen mill proprietor Joseph Alexander.
• Brewery founder Henry Schuster.
• Brickyard owner Edward Whitcomb, who spent six weeks on the frontier tracking down Indians during the Sioux Uprising.
• Attorney-turned hotel proprietor Orson Porter, who would succeed Dr.William Worrall Mayo as mayor.
• A young, self-taught lawyer named Frank Kellogg. Born in Potsdam, N.Y., Kellogg moved with his parents to a farm near Elgin when he was a boy. He worked as farm handyman in his late teens while studying the law. After being admitted to the bar at age 21 in 1877, Kellogg practiced law in Rochester for eight years, serving as city attorney and Olmsted County attorney before joining a cousin’s large law practice in St. Paul. Kellogg went on to become a U.S. senator, ambassador to England and secretary of state. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1929 for a series of pacts he negotiated with France and other countries.
But no one played a more significant role in Rochester’s first 60 years than Kellogg’s Rochester law partner, Burt Eaton. Not only did Eaton help Mayo Clinic get off to a fast start by agreeing to become its first business manager, but he also served at various times as mayor, city attorney, county attorney, judge and president of First National Bank.
Historian Mearl Raygor notes in his book “The Rochester Story” that Eaton was awarded the city’s distinguished citizens medal in 1940. “I don’t believe there is a thing of consequence or note that has been promoted in Rochester during the
past 60 years that Mr. Eaton has not been a part of,” Raygor quotes Mayor Paul Grassle as saying during the presentation.
Tornado aftermath
Some of these men are among those who met after the tornado had torn a third of the city to shreds in 1883.
Dr. Mayo, now in his 60s, led the charge to rebuild. He noted at a Board of Trade (a precursor of the Chamber of Commerce) meeting shortly after the storm that most of the 140 families who lost their homes had lived in Rochester for years. The main issue, he said, was to provide homes for them in an effort to keep them from moving to nearby communities.
A relief committee was organized, and the recovery effort began.
A Post account of the Board of Trade meeting ended with an excerpt of a poem by Henry Longfellow:
Let us then be up and doing
with a heart for any fate
still achieving, still pursuing
learn to labor and to wait.