Timeline & History of the Area

In the fifteenth century, when European settlers began to arrive in North America, the continent was richly populated with Native American communities. Hundreds of thousands of people lived in a wide range of environments from shore to shore, each community or nation with its own distinct culture. The centuries that followed the arrival of Europeans were years of tremendous upheaval, as the expansion of settler territory and the founding and growth of the United States resulted in Native American communities being moved, renamed, combined, dispersed, and, in some cases, destroyed.

The 1840s saw a series of shamefully unfair treaties, in the areas that we cover, whereby the Dakota, Ojibwe, and other Amerian Indian tribes gave up land in return for promises of goods and money that they never received. This made way for the massive immigration that began in 1949 when the Minnesota Territory was established by Congress. European-American immigrants were drawn to the region because of its many great natural resources that were ideal for the fur trade, farming, milling, and lumbering industries. 

Click on the link below to see a general timeline of how and when our area grew and the events that made it possible.