Sherburne History Center Blog

  March being Women’s History Month it seemed appropriate to start off the month noting a significant settler and educator from Sherburne County: Grace Craig.   Grace Craig circa 1940 Born in 1865 in the family homestead in Orrock Township, Grace Craig lived with her parents, two sisters and a brother.   According to a brief biography, Grace Craig lived at the homestead for her entire life.   To a certain degree her education developed through her own initiative.   As a teenager, the biography maintains, she obtained the skills for Sunday School teaching through a correspondence course.   While teaching, for fifty-eight years, at two Sunday Schools around Orrock and Snake River, she also upheld the responsibilities as local superintendent.   In addition to her work on the farm and at the local churches, she also served as the Orrock Township correspondent and reporter for the Elk River Star News.             ...

Recent research at the Sherburne History Center disclosed a copy of memoirs, describing the work of early settlement on farmland in the county. Written by Vernon Bailey, it provides interesting insight in the multitude of tasks needed to ready a farmstead for occupation.  Between other work during the winter, Father and Charles cut and hewed the logs and timber for the new house, hauled them together in the snow.   When spring came, the foundations of the house were laid, the walls were rapidly built up of great logs, fitted tight together and hewed smooth on the inner surface.   The roof was framed of dry tamarack rafters, wide roof boards, and good pine shingles.   A cellar for vegetables was dug under the house after the roof was on but later an outside bank cellar was constructed in the side hill at one corner of the house where milk and meat and vegetables and fruit could be kept cool in the summer and from freezing in winter.   When the house neare...

Bailey Station Depot circa 1910 A number of early pioneers, or settlers, of Sherburne County deserve recognition. Every few months we  notice one of these individuals.  Orlando Bailey, founder of Bailey Station, warrants recognition as an influential person in the settlement of Sherburne County.  Born in Chautauqua, New York in 1820, he migrated to Sherburne County with his family in 1852.  He built a small farm five mile west of Elk River and developed a stage station and hotel.  The site later expanded into a railway station and still later a gas station.  Orlando Bailey founded a transportation site encompassing every form of locomotion for 150 years.  After Orlando Bailey settled the area, he built (for the times) an elaborate hotel.  A 1944  family history written by his nephew Vernon Bailey, remembered Orlando Bailey and his home.  “We stayed for a time with Uncle Orlando in his big house, no longer used as a tavern, b...

A small diary in the collections of the Sherburne History Center provides fascinating detail about the early settlement of Elk River.  Eben H. Davis, at one time the Sheriff of early Sherburne County kept a travel diary in 1882.  In the autumn of 1882 he was part of a group surveying and “cruising” timber from Grand Portage to Hunter’s Island, Canada.  The final pages of this diary he provides background information about Elk River at the time of his settling in the area.  He gives two different dates for his arrival in Elk River: 1850 and 1851.   The date of his arrival matters very little.  The details of the settlement make this a valuable document.              In Sept. 1850 the writer hereof first came to Elk River.  Peter Bouttino was then building the Riverside Hotel.  His brother Chas. was living in and keeping Saloon in a log building about 4 or 5 rods west of the Hotel...