History of Carver (PDF)

Jonathan Carver 1710-1780 2016 UPDATE John von Walter Highlights of Carver History Ten thousand years ago glacial River Warren flowed through the Minnesota River Valley on which Carver is situated, carrying melt water away from retreating glaciers and leaving rich deposits of clay, sand, gravel, and fine silt soils, while cutting a deep and spectacular landscape. The River Warren was variously called the Riviere Pierre, the St. Peter River, Maddepaw, Menesotar, and finally the Minnesota River. Minnesota, a Dakota Indian name given to both the river and the state, means “sky tinted water”. Carver and its surrounding Minnesota River Valley environs was occupied by Native Americans of the Woodland Culture from about 1200 B. C. to 1850 A. D. This occupation was often a seasonal hunting and gathering event, though in more recent times it was given over to summer planting and late season harvesting. The Minnesota River was long a Native American waterway for travel by dugout, canoe, and on ice during frozen periods. Pierre-Charles Le Seuer is the first European known to have navigated the Minnesota River. In 1683 and 1700 he made exploration trips for King Louis XIV of France along the area that became Carver. In 1766 Captain Jonathan Carver, working for the British, explored the Minnesota River area near present day Carver while making maps and searching for a western water route that flowed across North America to the Pacific Ocean. He named a small branch flowing into the Minnesota River “Carver’s River”, after himself, carving his name in a tree at its outlet. This is undoutedly the Carver Creek of today. In 1804-1805, not far upstream on the Minnesota River from present day Carver, the Little Rapids trading post was established. It was first operated by Jean Baptiste Faribault of the Machilimackinac Fur Company and the Northwest Fur Company and visited by fur traders, Dakota Indians, and Christian missionaries over the next 45 years. In 1834 there was a Wahpeton (Sioux/Dakota) Indian village located at present day Carver, with Mazomani then being chief of this Carver-area band. An early map indicates that this was located at the mouth of Carver Creek where it meets the Minnesota River. Further upstream, adjacent to Faribault’s Little Rapids trading post, was another Wahpeton Indian village, also associated with Dakota leader Mazomani. Both the trading post and the Dakota Indian village were abandoned about the time of treaty-negotiated land transfers to the United States. In the summer of 1851 the Treaties of Traverse des Sioux and Mendota were signed between the Dakota and the U. S. Government. Before final ratification and legal opening for settlement actually took place in the U. S. Congress, Axel Jorgenson, an immigrant from Gjerstad in Aust-Agder County in southeast Norway, settled on land in the winter of 1851-1852 as a “Sooner”. Settling “sooner” than was legal, Jorgenson laid claim to 415 acres that would become the Town of Carver. The first European to settle in Carver, Jorgenson built a claim shanty “hotel” and variously named his claim Gotteborg, Lukenborg, or Luksenborg, which others came to call Fulton, perhaps after Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat. In the 1850s an investment epidemic was speculation on town sites for development. Promising river sites like Axel Jorgenson’s were highly desirable. Located with a source of fresh water at the junctures of Carver Creek and Spring Creek at the Minnesota River, Carver was a particularly advantageous site. It is the only spot on the entire ength of Minnesota River where two different watershed area creeks meet together at the river. And during low-river levels steamboats could travel upstream only about 2 ½ miles beyond Carver to double Jordan Sandstone barriers called the Carver Rapids (or Little Rapids), that lie several hundred yards apart on an “S” curve. Carver was an ideal location for a steamboat and barge terminal where goods and passengers would have to be offloaded and reloaded for continuing river trips in either direction, or offloaded for further land travel by oxcart, stagecoach, horse, or on foot. The Carver Rapids is the largest natural rapids on the entire 335-mile length of the Minnesota River. At some point since the most recent ice age the old Minnesota River channel passed upstream about 1 ½ miles northeast of the Carver Rapids, bypassed both the rapids area and present-day Carver, and returned to the present Minnesota River channel about a mile south of today’s Carver. This accounts for the present-day Carver Rapids’ hard limestone outcropping not having sufficient time to be eroded away. At the end of the last ice age the Minnesota River channel was cut much deeper and narrower than it is today. Centuries of erosion and flooding of it and its tributaries have gradually created the shallower and wider river of today. Drastically compounding this erosion since the 1850s has been the removal of riverside trees for steamboat fuel and firewood, and the additional clearing of trees for plowing, seeding, and farming in the fertile flood plains. All this has steadily eroded the river banks, spilling them into the river. This process continues today. In 1854 Axel Jorgenson, a Sooner or squatter, sold his 415 acre claim to a group of seven speculating St. Paul investors, collectively called the Carver Land Company, who wished to plat and develop a town site. Among these investors were Alexander Ramsey, the former Territorial Governor of Minnesota, and Levi Griffin, the first Sheriff of Carver County. It was Ramsey who suggested naming the town Carver after Jonathan Carver who had explored the area and given his name to nearby Carver Creek. The Carver Land Company property was surveyed by St. Paul surveyor and city engineer John T. Halstead (Halsted), who laid a grid over the property map and platted the Town of Carver in 1857, its lots divided among the land company investors according to their investment. Halstead (1817-1900), one of the oldest to enlist in the First Minnesota Volunteer Infantry Regiment at age 44, would later lose five fingers on his left hand in the First Battle of Bull Run and spend time in a Confederate prison in Richmond, Virginia during the Civil War. An economic depression, in part caused by inflated land prices from massive land and town site speculation, occurred in the late summer of 1857 and swiftly spread across America, called the Panic of 1857. Many fledgling town sites went belly up, and as mortgages were called in and all of frontier America was without cash for many months, requiring a barter system. Carver survived, but Louisville, directly across from Carver did not, and some of its buildings were moved to Carver. The Carver Levee along the Minnesota River was platted as common land to all the citizens, and from the 1850s to the 1890s it was a bustling hub of commercial and industrial activity that saw trade in grain, lumber, animals, firewood, brick, and merchandise, which give rise to many flourishing businesses, stores, livery stables, warehouses, blacksmith shops, brickyards, as well as hotels and saloons patronized by overnighters making Carver deliveries. Today the old levee is covered by a flood dike. By 1855 Carver already had a tailor, a hotel, a boarding house, a building designer, a carpenter, a livery stable, a blacksmith, two shoemakers, and a general store that contained dry goods, hats and caps, boots and shoes, clothing, groceries, and provisions. By 1856 there were 15 houses in Carver, and within a short time there was a ferryboat for Mississippi River crossings and a stagecoach line making scheduled runs on land travel to other area towns that sprang up at Cologne, Glencoe, and Henderson. By 1857 there were already 35 buildings in Carver, and steamboat Captain George Houghton was making daily round-trip runs on his steamboat, the Antelope, between Carver and St. Paul, a one-way river run of about 32 miles. Glacial drift boulders of Shakopee Limestone collected in the area supplied many of Carver’s earliest cellars and foundations. Buff-colored Shakopee Limestone often ranged from yellow to gold, to orange, to red in color, and is sometimes locally called Merriam Red Rock. Across the Minnesota River from Carver in Louisville in Scott County a quarry owned by Mrs. M. A. (Malvina) Spencer, born about 1821, featured Shakopee Limestone. Limestone from the Spencer quarry was eventually used in all of Carver’s early bridges, including its railroad bridges, as well as in many of the town’s earlier building foundations. The quarry’s limestone was also burned for lime, and mixed with site-present yellow sand, and because of its slower-setting properties, it was the choice for much of Carver’s brick and masonry stone work, as well as for preliminary coats of wall plaster. Carver had its own school district already by 1857, and for a century from 1858 to 1958 Carver was Minnesota School District #1. Among those living in Carver at the 1857 Minnesota Territorial Census and the 1860 United States Census were William McFadden Foster (1815-1874), his wife Sarah Ann Charlotte Murphy (1826-1906), and their children. The couple and their young son Jeremiah George Foster were deeply involved in of one of America’s most riveting tragedies and its worst wagon train disaster, with 42 of the travelers dying. The Fosters were part of the infamous Donner Party, caught stranded and starving over the winter in a Sierra Nevada mountain pass in on the way to California in 1846-1847. Perhaps an omen of things to come, on Oct.

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