Marshall
county lies in the Red River Valley which is prime wheat raising country.
It is part of the lake bed of the glacial Lake Agassiz which left a thick
layer of rich soil good for crops.
The
first people in the area were indians. Bands
of Chippewa or Ojibwa have lived in northern Minnesota since the 1600s.
They had been living on the east coast and had been pushed westward.
Because they were used to living in the woodlands, they found northern
Minnesota very much to their liking. The
Chippewa in turn pushed the Sioux or Dakota westward into Dakota.
By 1793 a permanent settlement of Chippewa was located at Red Lake.
A missionary, Rev. Sela G. Wright was stationed on a mission farm on Red
Lake during the 1840's and 1850's. Wright
wrote about a farm there that could produce 3000 bushels of corn and 2000
bushels of potatoes. This was in
1848 when most of northern and western Minnesota was considered wilderness.
The early french trappers traded with the Chippewa and even lived and
trapped with them. In 1890 a band
of Chippewa lived in Marshall county on the Sand Ridge near Thief Lake.
As
early as 1812 Lord Selkirk opened settlements from Winnipeg to Pembina and in
1821 many Swiss people were settled there.
Storms, floods, poor harvests, grasshoppers and famine discouraged the
people so that many soon left passing through present Marshall county on their
way to Fort Snelling and points south.
The
county was in a direct line from the Selkirk Red River Settlement to the
Mississippi River and one of the early trails passed through Marshall county.
The trails was used by fur traders in the early 1800's.
In 1823 Major Stephen H. Long led and exploratory group to the area.
The expedition traveled down the east side of the Red River, thus passing
through Marshall county. The Red
River became a travel waterway in the late 1850's when steamboats started
running from Fort Garry to Georgetown and Moorhead.
The first steamboat was assembled in 1858 at a townsite called La
Fayette, accross the Red from the mouth of the Sheyenne River.
The
present day Marshall county was first a part of Pembina county and Kittson
county. Michael "Tamarack
Mac" McCullough was the first permanent white settler.
He arrived about 1872, claimed 160 acres and built a cabin on a small
knoll alongside the Tamarack River. He filed for his homestead on May 6, 1879.
Other settlers had claimed land in Marshall county before Mac but did not
stay in the county. He was quite a
character being a hunter, trapper, trader and farmer. Tamarac Mac made trips to
Crookston, Grand Forks, and Moorhead for provisions.
The trips sometimes took a week to complete. A story remains that one time he was caught in a bad blizzard
about three miles from home. Being
blinded by the snow, he took hold of his oxen's tail and was led to safety at
the cabin of another settler Charles Wenzel.
The two became friends after that meeting.
Charles
Wenzel a native of Prussia, arrived in Marshall county via Quebec, Michigan and
Wisconsin. He was a blacksmith by
trade and settled in Marshall county in 1874.
He lived his remaining years in the Warren area.
A
few years later Halvor Gunderson walked from Crookston to the Red River armed
with only a butcher knife and an axe and settled in Marshall county.
Some others who arrived in 1878 and settle near Wentzel were Frank Smith,
W. A.
Wallace, A. P.
McIntyre, James B. Titus, Emmot W. Roosman,
J. W.
Slee, Ed Slee, A. E.
Flint, A. B. Nelson, J.
McCann and G. O.
Gross.
In
1879 while on a trip from Willmar to Crookston, Nels Malm met Peter Jarvis, a
settler from Lousia (Argyle). Peter
told Nels about "cream of the valley was around Lousia" and persuaded
him to come up and take a look. On
the trip from Crookston, they passed only two buildings at Warren.
Malm was impressed with Lousia and when he returned to Willmar he told
the people there about the land. That
fall he and several families in eight covered wagons moved to Argyle arriving on
November 4, 1879. The trip from
Willmar took 24 days. They drove 62 cows with them with most of the men walking
and herding the cattle.
Charles
A. Bergland working as an agent for the Cunard Steamship Line arrived in
Marshall county. He was impressed with the area and was responsible bringing
about 100 families from Sweden. They
settled near Warren. In 1878 the
railroad was extended to Marshall county.
The
early settlers were miles from any trading center and had to travel to Grand
Forks, Fargo, or Crookston to trade. The
only contact they had with other people was with bands of indians or an
occasional trapper or trader. The
Red River oxcart trail came through Marshall county and provided a visitor on
occasion. Most early settlers came
and claimed land under the Homestead Act of 1862.
The nearest land office was in Detroit Lakes about 100 miles to the
south. In 1879 a land office was
started in Crookston. The first
areas of the county to be settled were along the Red River and its tributaries,
the Snake, Middle and Tamarack rivers. On
the banks near the river were trees for homes and heat along with water for
drinking. Early settlers walked or
came in wagons but most of the later ones came by rail.
The
first railroad constructed in Marshall county was that of the St Paul and
Pacific Railway in 1878. The line
went from a point 4.9 miles north of Barnesville to a point 2.3 miles south of
Warren. Norman W. Kittson who worked for the Hudson Bay Company constructed a
line from Crookston to present Fisher. James
J. Hill and three canadians; Donald Smith (Lord Strathcona), George Stephen
(Lord Mount Stephen) and Norman Kittson completed the line from Warren to
Emerson. This made the line international.
On
February 25, 1879, the Minnesota legislature created Marshall county.
The land had been a part of Beltrami county until that time. The county
was named after William Rainey Marshall a former governor of Minnesota.
Marshall also served in the Seventh Minnesota regiment during the Civil
War where he achieved the rank of brigadier general. He was governor from 1866
to 1870. A strip of land one and
one-half miles wide was left between Marshall and Polk county because of the
manner of defining the northern border of Polk county.
This strip was added to Marshall county in 1883.
In
the fall of 1879, the first church (the Methodist Episcopal Church) was
established in Warren with Reverend Samuel Kerfoot the first minister.
Because there were no public buildings at that time, the first service
was held in the barroom of the Commercial Hotel.
A church was completed and dedicated on November 25, 1883.
The
first school district in Marshall county was organized on December 23, 1879 near
Stephen and opened after the Chirstmas holiday in 1880.
The first teacher was 16 year old Mary Ann Hughes.
Other
firsts for the county included the following.
The first marriage in Marshall couny was between Charles Wenzel and Emma
Smith from Switzerland and the widow of Peter Smith. The first white children born in the county were Roy Rossman
and Winnie McCrea both born in 1880. The
first brick manufactured in the county was by August Lundgren and the first
building of those bricks was the Bank of Warren erected in 1883.
As
with other counties, there was a contest over the county seat. Although Warren
had been considered the county seat when the county was created no official
action defined it to be so. On
February 8, 1881, the county commissioners passed a resolution that the safe be
placed in charge of the sherriff and moved to Argyle a few miles north of
Warren. The county business was
then conducted in Argyle. The
commissioners met there a few times but on February 27, 1882 they passed another
resolution authorizing the county chairman to hire men and teams to haul the
safe and other property from Argyle to Warren and place it in the count
buildings there. In 1881 the state
legislature passed an act establishing Warren as the county seat.
Central
Marshall county was settled mostly by Scandinavians starting in 1882.
Ole Folden settled near what is now Newfolden, the town being named after
him. He settled there along with
Ole O. Lee, Mathias Hanson and others. Samuel
Tunheim with his wife Taletta and daughter Marie arrived in Newfolden in 1884.
He edited and published a religious newspaper 'Bug og Hilson' on his farm
for several years.
Letters
back home to Norway have become the best ways of learning what life was like in
early settlements. The same is true
about Marshall county. Halvor
Torstveit who lived in Newfolden sent back the following message.
"This
has been a good year. I have put up
100 loads of hay on my land. I had
2 men to help me and paid them $1.00 per day...
I worked out in the harvest this year and received $5.00 per day for me
and the team. A relative drove my
oxen so I had $90.00 left when I paid him."
Torstveit's
brother-in-law Gunder Forberget sent a different message back home.
"Life
is good in many ways but the climate . . . hard to get used to .
. .
winters extremely cold, with severe storms, and the summers can be
extremely hot."
Neither
man returned to Norway however. Many
other families wrote both types of letter home, some returning to Norway but
most staying in Marshall county. Many
of the Norwegian papers contained stories of the good life in Minnesota and
caused several families to come to this country.
Eastern
Marshall county was the last part of the county to be settled with settlers
arriving there for the first time in the late 1890's. Most of early eastern Marshall county was dedicated to timber
and sawmills. One hazard the
settlers in the east had was forest fires which is the counterpart of the
western county hazard - prairie fires.
The
biggest hazard was, however, the annual spring flooding.
One of the worst floods occured in 1897 after a huge winter snowfall.
A sheet of water extended between the Snake, Middle and Tamarack rivers
which normally empty into the Red River. Ole
Sands used a raft to