Henry described the beautiful spot by the lake where so much poetry had come to him. He pleaded with Bayfield to build his town there. “Fortune is drawing me to that spot,” he said. He didn’t know that Bayfield already owned it.*
In late August 1852, a train of heavy wagons rumbled north on the Winnipeg Trail, drawn by octets of oxen, the drovers walking alongside, followed by a coach carrying seven bricklayers and a carriage driven by Mr. Bayfield with Henry and Elizabeth aboard, drawn by two high-stepping grays who tossed their handsome heads, upset at the slow pace. Twenty miles a day the caravan moved, along what is now U.S. 10, from St. Paul (formerly called Pig’s Eye) to the lumbering camp of Anoka and through the Benedictine mission of St. Cloud, then struck out cross-country to the Albion site north-northwest. In six days, they met up with only one southbound traveler: a man named Moon, on foot, who stood in their path and inquired for news. “You are the first I’ve seen all summer!” he cried.
He was wrapped in rags tied with leather thongs and wore a good beaver hat and carried a sack on his back that jingled when he set it down. “Tools of the trade,” he said. “Tinkering, preaching, and doctoring. Man and beast.”
“You’re far from any settlement to practice trades like those,” Bayfield said. “I know that now!” the man replied. He clutched at Bayfield’s sleeve and looked deep into Bayfield’s eyes—“The war with Mexico! Tell me how the battle goes!” he cried. “Has General Taylor yet taken Santa Anna?”
“The war is won, I’m pleased to tell you, and General Tàylor has been rewarded with election to the Presidency three years ago, but now that Mexico has surrendered, the country is under attack from the north.”
“The north?”
“Sir, let us speak privately so as not to alarm the lady—” and Bayfield led him away from the wagons, Henry following, to a low sandy hill under a small oak tree—“war with Canada is coming as sure as I stand here. The East is all ablaze with it. Villainy, sir! Unspeakable things! Crimes that no God-fearing man would care to contemplate! Yes, sir, the vicious Canuck will not rest until the Republic is lying in its own blood and gore! And where will they strike next, sir? Why, right here, in the most defenseless regions! That is why we are headed north, sir. And that is why you must continue south—to warn the citizens of St. Paul that the Canucks are moving! They are coming overland, they are moving by the rivers. And what is more heinous—their armies are infested with smallpox! Yes! Great swarthy brutes with rheumy eyes and fevered brows, open red sores on their bodies and green pestilence running down their legs! Go, sir! To St. Paul! And trust no man who denies the truth of it! Their agents are thick in the countryside. Spread the word! Go! Godspeed!”
The poor man looked at them in horror and ran away south, his bag jangling at his side. Henry watched in disbelief. “The frontier is for the strong,” Bayfield said. “Let rumors of war and disease keep the weak at home so the strong can flourish.”
“Lies,” Henry whispered. He sank to the ground. “Lies. You shouldn’t tell so many lies.”
“Courage!” Bayfield grabbed his hand and hauled him up. “A little courage, sir. We’ve come to build a city, a great, rich, populous city, and before we build, we must believe in it. Is that a lie? Is this a lie?” He reached into his coat and pulled out a sheet of paper which he unfolded and thrust at Henry.
It was a printed poster entitled NEW ALBION, THE BOSTON OF THE WEST, and under the title, a perfect picture of a town with great buildings, stately homes under broad trees, avenues thronged with traffic. “Home of New Albion College, World Revered Seat of Learning Set in This Mecca of Commerce and Agriculture. Dr. Henry Francis Watt, Ph.D., Litt. D., D.D., President. Choice Lots Remain For Purchase, $100.”
“Mr. Bayfield,” Henry gasped. “You take me for a much better man than I am!”
“Mr. Watt,” Bayfield replied, “you will do just fine, sir. You will accomplish the purpose admirably, I have every reason to believe it.”
“But Doctor! You have me a doctor of philosophy, literature, divinity—great God! I’ll be found out! There will be scandal! Outrage! People will never forgive it!”
Bayfield put his arm around the young man’s shoulders. “You seem to be ignorant of the true nature of doctors,” he said. “My boy, the first and foremost work of a doctor is to inspire confidence in his being one. So long as the public has faith in him, then any man can be a doctor, and if the public hasn’t faith, then the greatest doctor in the world will have no effect on them.”
“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.
New England’s wealthy store
Would draw us ever near.
Its mighty factories roar.
We cannot linger here.
All through the night we steer
Across the ocean deep.
Our hearts shall have no fear.
God watches whilst we sleep.
Though mighty tempests rage,
The western sky is clear.
The dawn of a new age
Awakes the pioneer.
On deck we pilgrims stand,
United all the more,
Looking out for land,
The Minnesota shore.
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:
O blessed Muse grant us ere long
The gift of glorious word and song
That we may sing, ere breath is gone,
The praises of New Albion.
And, the very next day, his petition answered, he brought forth
What dazzling sights mine eyes behold,
So beauteous, bountiful and bold,
Where blessings are made thousandfold—
Our noble home, New Albion.
“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.
Lake Wobegon Days Page 5