Beyond the Margin

By Joe Spear

War heroes, captains of industry, builders and thought leaders are woven into the fabric that is the remarkable history of Mankato.

It’s an intriguing story when one considers the big things that came from a small town on the Minnesota River. It’s a story of a culture that evolved from agrarian to industry to become a regional center for education, medicine and political forces.

It has become the place of a stunning reconciliation of cultures of the Native American community and the white settlers — a relationship that did not start well with the largest mass execution in U.S. history on Dec. 26, 1862, at the culmination of the U.S.-Dakota War.

Mankato people rank high in civic engagement and education — accumulating wealth, both real and cultural, as early as the 1900s. Why else would the writer and American critic Sinclair Lewis find Mankato an appropriate place to pen some of his most scathing criticism?

Mankato was not the model for the Lewis critique of small-town life and how restricting it was for his educated heroine Carol Kennicott in “Main Street.” That dubious distinction was left for his hometown of Sauk Centre.

Lewis spent the summer of 1919 writing “Main Street” in Mankato and historical accounts show him to be “boozily” attending parties, taking drives and speaking at the college. He said he enjoyed

Mankato with its gardens and aisles of elms calling it “New England reborn,” according to local historical accounts.

Mankato’s business history starts big and gets bigger.

Civil War hero Samuel Grannis eventually partnered with George Palmer to develop grain elevators in Minnesota and Iowa. He later sold his interest to R.D. Hubbard, who built and ran Hubbard Milling as a centerpiece of Mankato business for the next century.

Mankato became the center of modern-day agricultural processing when the Andreas brothers bought a small soybean processing plant in 1947 called Honeymead and eventually grew it into the largest soybean “expelling” plant in the U.S. by the 1960s

Duane and Lowell Andreas sold the plant and started a bank. They were then asked to run Archer Daniels Midland by Bud Archer in Minneapolis. Their future business success is history.

Unfortunately, such success led to the biggest soybean oil spill in state history when plant storage bins broke on a cold winter day in 1963, discharging 3.5 million gallons of soybean oil into the Blue Earth and Minnesota rivers.

That eventually led to the creation of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency and likely other such agencies around the country.

Mankato’s topography is noteworthy. Some geological experts suggest the Minnesota River is actually the natural flow of the Mississippi River and that the Mississippi’s headwaters only represent another river that should not have been called the Mississippi.

Mankato’s Kasota stone quarries stand as another remarkable piece of business history as the stone has been used to build palaces and monuments from China to Washington, D.C.

The Native American Dakota reconciliation with the white population took 110 years, but it’s a remarkable development is most important because it shows the rest of the world how two peoples can reconcile after horrific events that brought genocide-like results.

Mankato had its soldiers. While Gen. Henry Sibley’s troops stood over the largest mass execution in 1862, the U.S. Civil War raged.

Two Mankato area soldiers received the Congressional Medal of Honor for their service in the Civil War. Members of the 1st Minnesota Infantry Regiment were the first unit to sign up to fight the rebellion when called on by President Abraham Lincoln in 1861.

A Mankato soldier was buried in the cemetery at Gettysburg, a pivotal battle in the Civil War where the 1st Minnesota was far outnumbered by the Confederate forces, suffering 82% casualties, the most of any Union regiment.

William Henry Wickoff was shot through the heart and died instantly at Gettysburg and was eventually re-interred in the Easton, Pennsylvania, family cemetery.

Historians have noted the 1st Minnesota likely saved the Union in that battle as it was able to hold the line enough for Union troops to shore up the front.

Sgt. Milton Hanna and Sgt. Lovilo Holmes were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1898.

In 1863 Hanna and Holmes were part of a 16-soldier unit that defended a Union wagon train against 125 Confederate soldiers near Nolensville, Tennessee.

Mankato’s Civil War heroes are memorialized in the Boy in Blue monument in Lincoln Park.

As education became a societal building block in Minnesota, Mankato Normal School, second of its kind, was founded in 1868. It was a rather dubious distinction that the powers that be at the time would remove the first woman, Julia Sears, appointed to head the school five years after its founding. Students sided with her in a “rebellion” but to no avail. She vowed never to return.

As a matter of long overdue reparations to Sears, MSU named a new dormitory after her in 2008.

A university can be the wellspring of community prosperity and that has been the case at Minnesota State University, now the state’s second largest university behind the land grant University of Minnesota, and one with a nation-leading Division I hockey team.

Cultural awakenings, economic transformation and duty to country aptly describe the people of the Mankato region and their remarkable history.

It’s a great legacy to inherit.

Joe Spear is editor of Mankato Magazine. Contact him at jspear@mankatofreepress.com or 344-6382. Follow on Twitter @jfspear.