Lake Wobegon Days (7 page)

“But the degrees. I have no degrees,” Henry pleaded.

“First, we shall get the college on its feet. Then the college will grant you every degree that is needed.”

“I will get my degrees from my own college? Me, the president of that college? Do you think it is right, Mr. Bayfield?”

“This is the West, Mr. Watt. Here, men are not so dependent on the opinions of others. Here, it matters less what others think than what a man himself says he is. Look around you, sir, and you will see men who were mere mechanics, workingmen, even foreigners, become masters of great affairs and vast estates. That is why we have come here. So as not to be held back by requirements!”

“I wish I had your confidence,” Henry said.

“Begin to have confidence. Let yourself have confidence in small things, and soon you will believe in great things. Take a word of advice, Mr. Watt. Begin with your wife.”

“My wife?”

“You let her be too familiar. Tell the good woman that henceforth she must address you as Dr. Watt. Enforce a little respect in your home, and the world will follow suit, and you will be Dr. Watt wherever you go. But be Henry to her, and the world will sense the weakness, and you will never be any more than a Henry, and, sir, this college cannot be founded by such a man. It requires a doctor.”

This conversation had almost exhausted Henry. Beyond the ruts of the trail, he saw no sign of settlement, no sign that humankind had ever come this way, only woods and, to the west, the river. I should turn back now, he thought. It would be more honorable. But he didn’t know where he was. Dark was coming on. Elizabeth had weak ankles. To do the right thing: go straight to the wagons, take the trunk from the carriage, and turn back for St. Paul—he was too tired. And the trunk—he had packed a small library in there, it weighed two hundred pounds. All those books, should he just dump them in the woods?

“Can I trust you?” he asked Bayfield.

“I hope that you will. I know that you can.”

“Then I do,” Henry said, and they returned to the wagons.

Late that evening they arrived at the site. They wrapped themselves in blankets and lay down, exhausted, on the ground and fell asleep. When they awoke, they were in their new home.

A thick mist lay on the lake, giving it a look of vastness. Bayfield was gone. The drovers made a fire and put on a pot of coffee and began frying up pancakes and slabs of pork. Bayfield returned from the lake with three good-sized fish. “Everything looks better in the morning,” he said. Elizabeth went down to the lake to bathe. Henry sat on a rock and waited for breakfast. “All my life, my one great talent has been resignation,” he wrote. “I have been prepared for defeat, have welcomed failure, and have quietly walked away from every enterprise that engaged me. Now, God give me strength. Now this place is home, and here I make my stand. This is our new life, beginning today. There is nowhere to go to from here.” He wrote “New Albion College” and under it listed a dozen subjects, including Philosophy and Oratory but also Manual Arts and Husbandry.

Three years later, in 1855, a Mr. Wm. Stinson, eighteen, observed the same lake on a misty fall morning, and rushed off for pencil and paper to write the New Albion College hymn.

Seven boys comprised the choir, they being the entire student body: Mr. Stinson and his cousin B. Maxwell; two Baxters, Jn. and Jas.; P. Herman; Robt. Powell; and a seventh whose name is only a blue pool on the ledger due to water damage. This hardy band of scholars descended on a village half-housed in tents and shanties, a college that was no more than a long pine table and Dr. Watt standing at the head of it and reading from Hunt’s
Second Latin Primer;
a college that bore no more resemblance to the advertisement than a pine cone to an oak tree, but they were true scholars and didn’t question such a discrepancy. Years later, Mr. Stinson, then of Stinson & Maxwell wheat brokers, recalled New Albion as the happiest years of his life. “Pioneering! That glorious word is one the boy of today, alas, will never know,” he wrote in 1880, “the delicious pleasure of studious pursuits in a world that remains to be made—to be pupil
and
carpenter—to
pore over the copybook at a desk built with one’s own hands! It speaks a beauty to my soul that is now departed, I am afraid, from our institutions of learning.”

In 1855, New Albion College moved from its handsome little edifice on Van Buren Street (now owned by Bunsen Motors and used for storage) to a campus at the other end of the lake. Bayfield had left, gone to Wisconsin to buy up land and become a timber baron and lay waste to three counties. Without his mentor on hand to remind him from whence the
Dr.
had come, Henry grew into his title and even added a new one,
Reverend
, and became ever more stately, grandiloquent, and obese. “Reverend Watt occupied the pulpit for almost two hours,” the St. Paul
Democrat
reported of his preaching debut in that city, “and his strength did not wane nor his voice abate but continued with full force to the very end.”

New Albion in 1855 was a settlement of some two hundred souls, mostly New Englanders, who had built from memory a few substantial buildings, including a Lyceum for the College and a white frame church, its great needle of a spire rising high above the oaks, and also a large collection of houses, most of them small and considered temporary until the inhabitants should prosper and build themselves the great homes they aspired to, the ones pictured on the prospectus.

“Mr. Bayfield’s advertisement is a noble vision of what shall be,” Mr. Horace Shaw wrote home to Connecticut; he had joined Mr. Thomas Getchell in Shaw & Getchell Transfer Company, which hauled a load of lumber to New Albion, arriving in May 1855. Half the lumber was used for traction, the streets, though laid out at right angles as in Bayfield’s plan, being almost impassable whenever it rained and during the spring thaw.

They had known mud in New England, of course, but there was no mud like what they found in Minnesota. The town sat in a swamp from April until June, and then again in July, and often in August, too, while September brought some more, and one October, three days of rain made them a lake that promptly froze over for six months, a spacious icecap, though that was an unusually cold winter—often, January brought a false thaw and a week or two of mud.

In the mud season, men drove their teams through yards to avoid
the streets, until the whole town was churned up. Sanitation being informal, houses sitting in a sea of mud and manure strewn with scrap lumber and odds and ends of every sort of trash, a man could stand on the backstep, look at the yard, and with a clear conscience throw out a bucketful of slops and the contents of the thunderjug: what was wrong with a little bit more when there was so much already?

The names on the 1854 tax roll included: Ames, Hinkley, Putnam, Giddings, Cutter, Bellville, Branch, Crandall, Getchell, Stewart, Brown, Knox, Varney, Porter, Sutton, Beatty, Hatch, Frost, Fairbanks, Lane, Court, Robbins, West, Sellers, McKinney, Smith, Woodbury, Twitchell, Lindsay, Hines, Burns, many of whom formed the “Fifty-fourers” club in 1860.

Fifty-nine votes were cast on April 7, 1854, electing the town board, Mr. Getchell being the leading vote-getter with seven, four others receiving six apiece.

A flour mill was completed about May 1, located on the creek. There was hardly enough wheat to keep it running, but a mill had been in Bayfield’s plan so it was built, howbeit much smaller than pictured. In 1855, when the wheat harvest was more abundant, the mill broke under the load, having been poorly designed by Mr. Robbins from an article in
The National Husbandman
, which omitted several small parts having to do with lubrication.

One store had been opened, McKinney’s and Branch’s, to be joined by a second, the Mercantile, which then began a newspaper,
The New Albion Star
, to promote its goods, which rivaled that of “any emporium west of Chicago” for “dry goods, groceries, clothing and provisions.” The Albion House, a “large and commodious” hotel, was kept by Mr. A. M. Varney, and “in the thoroughness of its appointments has secured a reputation second to none in the territory and would do no discredit to any town in the Northwest, even St. Paul.”

“Fifty-one buildings, including dwellings &c., now enliven the western shore of Lake Wobegon,
^*
a considerable work in a town
of scarcely sixteen months age, especially for persons of refinement,” wrote the
Star.
The term “persons of refinement” had been used by Bayfield in the circulars he mailed east, and apparently it was they who made the arduous journey to his settlement, expecting to find persons of similar refinement when they arrived. New Englanders all and Congregationalists, they brought with them a love of music and pictures, not to mention back-breaking loads of books. They built first the College—a one-story frame cottage with two Greek columns slightly taller than itself, then the handsome brick edifice—and some time later built a grammar school, the students having been housed in the train depot, the railroad having not yet arrived. Of the fifty-one buildings, of which the “&c.” included some woodsheds and privies, one of the first was an Opera House, a long shed where every Saturday night those who could sing did and the others observed, and where, in 1856, an opera was performed, Mrs. Groat’s
Song of Hiawatha
for “5 singers, violin, cornet, harmonium, and tom-tom” and featuring the town’s own Madame Juliet Putnam, whose composer-husband James Nelson Putnam penned, upon his arrival, the town’s first song:

And, the very next day, his petition answered, he brought forth

“The city of New Albion was owned and laid out by a company of energetic men from Boston, principally Mr. Benjamin Bayfield, who has now turned his energies to the lumbering business elsewhere,” Mr. Getchell wrote home to his brother in Milford, Maine. “It is a thriving and very refined community where King Alcohol has yet to rear his terrible head, and growing like a house afire. Every day newcomers arrive and the next day they have established an address—that is pioneering: move your family and belongings onto the ground and build the walls around them. I am very pleasantly situated in my house made of logs hewed, two storys high, with a parlor in front and kitchen back and all the rooms papered and carpeted, in which parlor the City Council meets once a month, of which I have been elected the president. The state of things is prosperous at present—indeed, all are getting rich at a rapid rate and think nothing of doubling their prosperity once in five or six weeks. The price of farm land rises by leaps and bounds and town lots too, of which I have purchased seven at $500 each for the small sum of $70, which is the first year’s interest on the mortgage and which I hope to sell within six months and become a creditor myself. Meantimes, I must find a livelihood, however, as I don’t have ready cash on hand and am considering using two of the lots as security to purchase a half-interest in the newspaper.”

The town’s main industry appears to have been speculation, judging from feverish articles in the
Star
that predicted the imminent arrival of the St. Paul & Manitoba railroad and great fortunes for all. The town was mortgaged to the hilt; by 1856, six thousand lots were owned by two hundred forty-seven persons, most of whom, while practicing a trade temporarily, were really in the business of waiting—waiting for the railroad to appear on the horizon and buy right-of-way (along the obvious practical route from the south, lots were going for up to $1000), and deliver carloads of innocents to drive up the value of land. (Unbeknownst to them, the first-comer, Mr. Bayfield, already had sold off the New Albion Land Company, after first issuing three thousand new shares, and by 1856, his sole interest in town was a four-room house, empty except for a spinet in the parlor, still in its crate.)

“This is a strange place,” wrote Mr. Getchell’s brother, who
spent two months in New Albion in the spring of 1856, to his wife in Milford.

Tom will hear of nothing but future prosperity, but one’s view of the future depends on how deeply one is in debt—to him, who holds a ream of paper elegantly engraved in gold and giving him title to acres of mud and weeds, New Albion is at the verge of triumph, and to myself who am free and clear, it is not so much a City as a trance, a whimsey built on a swamp, a steeple waiting for its church, a naked man in a fine silk hat. In the public room of the Albion House, such men spend their afternoons in languid conversation about this and that, the Republican Party, the Kansas question, the writings of Whittier and Mrs. Stowe and Howell’s ‘Prometheus,’ Unitarianism, and the Individuality of Experience and the Nature of the Soul and the Moons of Neptune, and what work is accomplished is done by, at most, a dozen hands, and that not always of an enduring nature—for example, a board-walk laid yesterday and today capsized in the mud. It is a ‘City’ of leaning fences and mishung doors, of buildings begun and then forgot, of handsome unpainted houses, of timid little shops huddling behind magnificent facades. Scenes of squalor so long associated with drunkards, you will find here, the population being intoxicated by dreams of easy income. No common labor for them! No thrift—they are ‘financially embarrassed’ but do not blush! To them, what is is not but is what shall be, a seat of wealth and influence and themselves sitting squarely in the middle of it.