On the Dune Sand in old St. Anthony

“When I first came to St. Anthony in 1849, there were no sandburs. They did not come until after a flock of sheep had been driven through the town. We always thought they brought them. The sand was deep and yielding. You would step into it and it would give and give. It would seem as if you could never reach bottom. It would tire you all out to walk a short distance. We soon had boards laid down for walks.”

“When we first built our house I wanted a garden. My brother said, ‘You might as well plant seeds on the seashore,’ but we did plant them and I never had seen such green stuff. I measured one pumpkin vine and it was thirty feet long.”

- [Mrs. James McMullen, came to St. Anthony in 1849. Old Rail Fence Corners, p. 36.]

Dune Sand and the first University Farm

In 1868 the Regents of the University of Minnesota bought for the Experimental Farm a tract of land of inferior quality, a quarter of a mile east of the campus on the main road to St. Paul. Professor Charles Y. Lacy was head of the farm.

“It did not take Assistant Professor Lacy long to discover that the twenty-five acres of the experimental farm that had been broken were ‘of a sandy nature,’ exhausted by cropping, and that the remaining area would produce nothing but marsh hay until it was drained.” [Folwell IV, pp. 86-87]

Lacy resigned in 1880 and his position remained vacant through 1881. “In this interval the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railroad Company ran double freight tracks diagonally through the farm, a considerable fraction of which had been cut off in a previous year by the opening of University Avenue. The farm was now cut into four parts of unequal area.” [IV, p. 88]

They decided to find different land. They sold the sandy land along University Ave. SE near Oak St. and bought “a quarter section in Ramsey County on the Como Road, distant some three miles from the University [east bank] campus. The tract consisted of all but five acres of the northwest quarter of section 21, township 29, range 23 west. The Regents also bought ninety-three adjoining acres; this land—known as the Bass Farm—was the nucleus of the St. Paul campus. [IV, p. 88]

- Folwell William Watts, History of Minnesota, 4 vols. Vol. IV., on the University’s Experimental Farm sand

Compiled by Connie Sullivan