Lake Wobegon Days (10 page)

New Albion, Minn.

Jan. 18, 1858

Mr. W.H. Waters

St. Paul, Minn.

Dear Sir: Your favor of 2nd ints. was duly received, requesting information concerning your obtaining a position with New Albion College as an instructor of moral theology. It was good of you to recall so pleasantly our lecture on “American Poets” of ten years ago at the Philolectian Club in your city, of which we are pleased to have a fair copy and send to you with warmest recollections of that evening.

We are only sorry to report that the College has suspended classes after some skulduggery hereabouts by wild bears struck terror into our ranks and emasculated our numbers, hence we are unable to offer employment. Of course, we intend to persevere and triumph over the present trouble, to which end we depart Wednesday next for Boston where we hope to secure support, both financial and moral, of a nature and amount more generous than could be found in this sparsely populated county, and when we return, we trust that we will have better news for you. With best wishes for success and prosperity.

Very truly yours,

     Henry Francis Watt,
Ph.D.

Evidently, Dr. Watt did make the trip to Boston, because it was there that he died in April, of a seizure, in a hotel room, following a dinner with prospective backers. When he failed to return to New Albion, the trustees of the College voted to suspend operations until the fall, and in the fall, when no students appeared (they had heard the College had closed), the College closed for good, and the property was put up for sale; a few years later, after a fire destroyed the Main building, the land was bought by a Mr. Moore who built a barn on the
old foundations and used the remaining structures for storage. The great bell had fallen in the fire and Mr. Moore was able to raise it just enough to turn it upside down to where it could be used to water livestock.

“The year 1857 will be remembered as the year when all false hope was lost,” wrote Mr. Getchell sadly to his brother in Maine. “So much is gone that once we could not live without, and yet we do live somehow and even sometimes think hopefully of tomorrow.”

The railroad took its sweet time arriving. The Northern Pacific reached St. Cloud and continued north along the Mississippi to Little Falls, and the Great Northern swung west through St. Joseph, Avon, Albany, and Freeport, while the Soo Line ran northeast from Albany to just south of Little Falls, the three lines making a triangle and each missing the town by miles. Bribes were paid to railroad officials, of course, but other towns paid bigger ones. The handsome depot built to lure the lines sat empty and its platform opened onto a field of alfalfa where a tiny sign on a pole stood, which said “W.” The town board sent monthly petitions to St. Paul, and a delegation attended every grand opening of new track for miles around, of which there were many. Each of the major railroads had a ceremonial train known as a “jacker” with a flatcar for a band, two or three coaches for the guests, and a palatial parlor car to haul the dignitaries, and when the line reached a town or a spot where the railroad intended to promote a town, the special train was run out for the day for speeches, music, and the driving of a special spike, usually brass. The Albion delegation lobbied hard at these occasions, carrying a satin banner emblazoned “New Albion—Gateway To Central Minnesota,” not knowing that the dignitaries on hand were men of great dignity but little influence who had time on their hands and enjoyed sitting on platforms for a small per diem.

Years later, Jonson Ingqvist visited the abandoned Great Northern building on Market Street in St. Paul, looking for a good used desk, and found in a pile of rubbish on the fourth floor a file marked
“Albion” containing letters from the town promoting itself as a rail center. The file was marked: “Error—no such appears on map—must mean Albany.” Albany, to the south of New Albion, was on the main G.N. line.

The ultimate connection of the town, in 1885, with the so-called “Lake Wobegon spur,” was a mistake on the railroad’s part, a siding that took a sharp angle due to misplaced surveyors’ stakes and that kept going for sixteen miles in an attempt to find its way back to the main line. When the track crew reached New Albion, which was not on their map and which at any rate was now called Lake Wobegon, they simply stopped and returned to St. Cloud by horse-drawn wagon, leaving the track where it is today, a quarter-mile south of town, ending in thick brush by the depot. (The depot was moved south on skids to reach the end of the line.) A district superintendent was fired for his negligence; the spur appears on G.N. maps as a dotted line marked “See Code,” but there is no code. The company nonetheless began regular shipping over the spur that year, which continued until 1965. Passenger service was always by petition, fifty names being required due to the inconvenience of the stop (trains have to back in the full distance), and so was mostly limited to great occasions such as the Norwegian Tricentennial, the inauguration of Governor Burnquist, and Dan Patch’s running at the State Fair.

In 1922, the westbound Empire Builder entered the spur by mistake on June 4, shortly before midnight, and raced toward Lake Wobegon carrying 432 passengers, including Rita Melitta, The Cream of Wheat Quartet, The Laughing Waters Orchestra, and Douglas Byron Rochester, author of
The Boy Brigade
series. The great train swept on toward its doom, its bar car blazing with light as the merrymakers danced in the aisle, until, a quarter-mile short of sure death, their lives were saved by a Holstein belonging to a farmer named Brown, which strolled onto the tracks. The engineer applied his brakes too late to save the cow but just in time to stop the train at the station, where he noticed, a few yards ahead, the two rails end. The passengers disembarked for a few minutes while a trainman ran to find out where they were. No lights appeared in town, everyone had turned in. “Who would want to live in a burg as dead as this?” remarked Rita Melitta,
not knowing that Mr. Lundberg the undertaker had nearly received her business that night.

A few months later, the train carrying the Sorbasol All-Star barnstorming team backed into town, carrying Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson, Long George Kelly, and Wild Man Ringsak, and departed in the evening on the long end of a 17-5 score.

The first primary school in Mist County (aside from the singing school run by Madame Putnam) was taught by Miss Emily Chase (later Mrs. Getchell) the winter of 1853-54, a private school kept in a boarding house run by a Mr. Charles Church which later was discovered to be a tavern. The next winter there was no school, and in the summer of 1855 Mr. Bayfield’s empty house was pressed into service, twenty-six pupils attending, run by Miss Ida J. Packard who was all of sixteen and was hard put to keep order. Early in November 1856, a regular schoolhouse was built on Van Buren (now McKinley) next to the Albion Shoe Company, and some forty-five pupils enrolled under Mr. Sewell W. Smiley, whose brother Newell was in the shoe business. Miscreants were sent to him and put to work scraping cowhide in the cellar, where, it was said, the vapors from the curing vats were strong enough to destroy human hair and where, some older children said, Mr. Newell Smiley had once made four pairs of ladies’ boots from a 14-year-old boy. The school year passed without incident.

The first county superintendent of schools appears to have been Dr. Tuttle, who served from 1860 until his death in 1874. A four-room schoolhouse was built in 1866 on Maple, and the Van Buren school was moved to Taylor Street, where it was used for storage by Shaw & Getchell—or else the new school was built on Taylor and the Van Buren school was moved to Maple, in which case
it
is the building that burned in 1871—no one is quite certain on this point. Some tend to believe the latter, since Shaw & Getchell were out of business by then, though Mr. Shaw himself still operated a couple wagons for hire and might have needed storage facilities—and yet, if the Van Buren school was moved to Taylor, how does one explain
the building in the 1870 photograph labeled “Old School,” which stood next to the Congregational Church and which, judging from the children hanging out the windows, was used for a purpose other than storage? On the other hand, the structure on Maple that burned the following year is described in some accounts as “abandoned”? Is it possible that the “Van Buren” school was actually built on
Taylor
and then
moved
to Van Buren (where the Congregational Church stood) after the Maple school was built and before the fire destroyed the Shaw & Getchell warehouse (abandoned because they had gone out of business)? Or—and I lean toward this theory—was there a
third
schoolhouse involved, one that was known as “Old School” and which was not adjacent to the church (a thin white line appears between the two in the photograph) but which remained on Van Buren (on the corner with Maple)? That would leave two other buildings, one to be a warehouse and the other to burn. In any case, the abandoned New Albion College (the building in town) was taken over by the school district in 1882 (the year after a fire damaged but did not destroy it). It stands today on McKinley (formerly Van Buren) and is used as a warehouse.

The first person to be killed by a white man in the New Albion area was the French-Canadian voyageur named Tourtelotte, struck on the head with a paddle by Boule Simmcon in 1742 as they entered the lake after a long day going upstream on the Malheur River and saw they had followed the wrong branch of the Sauk. Authorities at the Hudson’s Bay Company headquarters in Grand Portage ruled that the homicide was justifiable—Tourtelotte was known as a man who always took the bow position in the canoe and used a sweep-stroke that achieved little propulsion while splashing the man in the stern—and anyway Simmcon had suffered enough from the victim’s company. “M. Tourtelotte knew but two Voyageur’s Songs and of those only the Choruses,” said the inquest report, “and made of them such a Constant Clangour as to propagate Dread and effect a Shew of Force.”

A man was shot in New Albion on election day in 1860, but
recovered. He had not made his loyalty evident and might have been a Republican, but the Republican who shot him was taking no chances. He was held in the town jail but was released to join the Army, which he did, and died at Antietam.

In April 1861, Robert Wise, visiting his uncle, Mr. Tripp, was killed by a trapper named Bowers who thought the young man had stolen his furs and who was wrong about that and felt remorse and hung himself in his cell; he was acquitted by the jury on account of his death.

On December 24, 1868, at a dance at the New Albion House, a man was stabbed and killed who was not the man the assailant intended to kill, the man who had given an expensive brooch to a woman nearby, but the man standing next to him. The murderer served several years at the penitentiary in Stillwater. The woman had been betrothed to the murderer. She married the man who gave her the gift and they removed to Minneapolis.

In June 1875, Mr. Herman Daly was shot and killed in his field by a neighbor, Azariah Frost, whose son David had married Mr. Daly’s daughter Maud two years before; Frost then returned home and killed himself.