This week in local history

Historic Minnesota events with anniversaries this week.

Aug. 7

1915 Towed by the Ottumwa Belle, the last log raft passes from Minnesota and into Iowa. It was the last of just two runs on the river for the season. The sawmills along the river soon cease operations as the lumbering era draws to a close. At the peak of the timber industry in Minnesota and the region in the 1880s, some 500 rafts of white pine came down the Mississippi each month.

Aug. 8

1857 An organized baseball team is organized and for the first time in Minnesota, a baseball game is played in Nininger, a year-old city with high hopes for the future. The Base Ball Club plays two intrasquad games, on the 8th and 15th. Baseball was likely part of the rosy promotion of the town as the “The Panic of 1957” soon hit, forcing the close of banks and high unemployment. Investments in the future of Nininger, already on shaky ground when a railroad bridge over the Mississippi River was built in nearby Hastings, dried up. Within a few years, Nininger became a ghost town.

Aug. 9

1842 The Webster–Ashburton Treaty, which set the boundary between Canada and the United States, is signed by the United States and Great Britain. The boundary had been in dispute since the end of the American Revolution. Minnesota’s curious Northwest Angle is a result of this treaty, which wound the boundary through the Lake of the Woods using traditional water routes used by voyageurs and, to the consternation of many, faulty maps.

August 10

1910 Mailcarrier John Beargrease dies. Born in 1858, the son of an Ojibwe leader and a white woman, Beargrease grew up in Beaver Bay and delivered mail along the north shore of Lake Superior from 1887 to 1904, his route being Two Harbors to Grand Marais. During open water the trip took him three days by rowboat, and in the winter he used a dogsled.

August 11

1992 The Mall of America opens to an unexpected parking crunch, and an estimated 150,000 shoppers, who, as the Star Tribune would comment, “took a vacation from recession and bought.” Standing on what was the site of Metropolitan Stadium, the “megamall” is the largest in the United States.

August 12

1940 A tractor-truck made by the Minneapolis-Moline Power Implement Company receives nationwide attention during army battle maneuvers at Camp Ripley. Soldiers would call it the “jeep.” Company history says the machine brought to mind the Popeye cartoon figure called Eugene the Jeep, which was neither fowl nor beast, but knew all the answers and could do most anything. Because of the truck’s ability to maneuver in any terrain, the National Guardsmen called it the ‘Jeep.’

1983 The first WeFest takes place in Detroit Lakes, featuring performers Alabama, Merle Haggard, Tammy Wynette, Jerry Lee Lewis, and others. The biggest country music and camping festival in the nation, it attracts tens of thousands of country music enthusiasts annually.

August 13

1849 Minnesota Territory’s first court session is held in Stillwater. Reportedly, only one man on the jury wore boots. All the rest had moccasins.

This column is derived from MNopedia.org and developed by the Minnesota Historical Society.