Introduction The tiny village of Good Thunder

The tiny village of Good Thunder lies at the geographic center of Blue Earth

County in south-central Minnesota not far from the banks of the Maple River. Styling

itself as a “unique village with a rich heritage,” Good Thunder is the home of some 568

residents and a handful of businesses. Good Thunder today may be described as a sleepy

village offering small town values and safety, and serving as a commuter town, or

“bedroom community,” for the city of Mankato twelve miles to the north. In its heyday,

Good Thunder was a self-sufficient boom town on the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul

railway, offering most all of the goods and services a village resident or outlying farmer

needed for life in rural Minnesota.

Good Thunder’s name alone often piques interest when people hear it, remarking

on the uniqueness of the name. It is one of the few cultural imprints of the extensive

Winnebago reservation that encompassed a large part of Blue Earth County in the

midnineteenth century. The fact that residents past and present are proud of and know of

the story behind the name of the village is in and of itself unique, especially when

Map 1: Highway Map of Blue Earth County, 2003

(Map from Blue Earth County Public Works Department, Blue Earth County, Minnesota Highway Map

([Mankato: Public Works Department], 2003).)

considering the negative sentiments and long memory of white settlers and their

descendents in the county regarding Indians in general after the Dakota Conflict in 1862.

In its heyday, Good Thunder was known by its school, its tidy appearance, and its many

shops and services, whereas today many south-central Minnesotans know of Good

Thunder by the mural on the grain elevator.

Good Thunder was established during the height of the American pioneer agrarian

society, serving as a “city-center” for the residents in the surrounding Lyra township.

Throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth

century, agriculture was the primary natural resource upon which the residents of Good

Thunder based their economic and community life. Even now at the beginning of the

twenty-first century, agricultural life remains the mainstay of the area surrounding Good

Thunder, as evidenced by the six century farms existing between 1976 and 1989, most of

which still exist today. Nevertheless, Good Thunder today is no longer a town with a

thriving agricultural economic base. It is instead a bedroom community, serving as a

residential island in a sea of corn and soybean fields for residents who work in Mankato,

Mapleton, or at other industries and towns in outlying areas.

The objective of this thesis is to consider the transformation of the village of Good

Thunder, Minnesota over time and address the significance and origin of the village’s

features, and how it has sustained an identity and viability as a community. This is the

story of Good Thunder as a cultural landscape in the context of historical geography,

beginning in the pre-settlement era in the 1850s through the present day. It describes the

land which the settlers found so bountiful, the brief occupance of the Winnebagos when

the area was reservation land, and the significance of the two Indians, both by the name

of Good Thunder, for whom the village was named. This story discusses the social and

cultural aspects of the community with descriptions of use and occupance of commercial,

residential, and public buildings in the village for five different eras since 1871. Not all

the stories are known, however, and much remains a mystery, especially from the early

history, such as the mention of the opera house or the

Methodist congregation.

A historical geography of Good Thunder is significant for a variety of reasons. It

explores the survival of a rural agricultural community through a period in the 1970s and

1980s when many similar communities were dying. It provides a formal history of the

village with an account of the accomplishments of individuals, organizations, and

businesses of the community. Furthermore, a historical geography documents the

influences of culture and change impelling Good Thunder “to act and react” within the

contexts of south-central Minnesota culture and the modern state, national, and global

society.

“Historical geography is the study of the geographies of past times, involving the

imaginative reconstruction of a wide range of phenomena and processes central to … the

dynamism of human affairs … in the form and functions of human settlements and built

environments.”

~Robin Butlin

Chapter 1

Information Sources and Critical Perspectives

Historical Geography

The term “historical geography” invites the question “what is the difference

between history and geography?” Alan Baker explains that history, historical geography

and geographical history share many of the same experiences with respect to problems,

sources, and methodologies, incorporating knowledge and using research tools and

methods from the natural and social sciences. Jan Broek elaborates further by discussing

the commonalities between history and geography, observing that geography and history

both deal with the complexities of social life, synthesize knowledge from other sciences

and disciplines, and characterize “explanation” as the demonstration of the “existence of

relationships between different categories of facts.”

In order to better understand the relationships and differences, it is important to

define the disciplines of history and geography independently. Jacques Barzun and Henry

Graff concisely describe history as the study and reporting of past events and facts, or a

recording of actual occurrences that have happened in the past. The key notion for a

definition of history is the story; that is to say, documents that record historical events are

not in themselves history. History requires the “experiencing mind”5 to write a story

bridging historical occurrences and documents or records.

Defining geography is more problematic because of the various paradigm shifts in

the discipline in the last fifty years and the large number of specialties within the

discipline, such as physical, cultural, economic, urban, etc. Broadly stated, geography is

the study of the interactions between humans and the physical environment, or “the study

of the differentiation of the earth’s surface… resulting from complex interactions of man

and his habitat.” Geography as a discipline may be divided into two branches of research:

physical geography which studies physiography, or the “natural forms of the earth’s

surface,” and human geography, which concerns itself with the study of “causal

relationships between man and the land.”10 Within the human, or cultural, branch of

geography is the specialty of historical geography, which is the study of geography in a

past time concerning land use and settlement of a specific era or a succession of eras.

Historical geography as a special discipline of study has existed in some form

since the early eighteenth century, beginning with Biblical geographies, then moving on

to the geographies of classical civilizations.13 Scholars in the latter half of the eighteenth

century began writing historical geographies of the places they lived out of a sense of

nationalism, particularly in Latin America. These early historical geographies dealt

mainly with the geographic features of the landscapes, and also showed land use,

cultures, political boundaries, and cities. During the early twentieth century, geographers

in England, France, Germany, the United States began to seriously debate historical

geography as a discipline, and each country had its set of “founding fathers” establishing

theories and methodologies that added to and enriched the definition of historical

geography.

The development and employment of historical geography methodologies in the

United States over the past century can best be discussed within a framework of four

discourses on landscape. George Henderson defines these discourses as landscape as

Landschaft, landscape as social space, the epistemological landscape, and the apocryphal

(or ideological) landscape. Each discourse employs specific ideas about historical

geography, using different types of knowledge claims and empirical sources.

In the United States, Harlan Barrows, Ralph Brown, and Carl Sauer took up the

role of defining and developing historical geography in the 1920s. Their ideas, which are

the basis from which the three other discourses are derived, laid the groundwork for

discourse of landscape as Landschaft. The change of the rural landscape through its ties

to the ideologies of nationhood and territory defines the concept of Landschaft. It

examines place over space, incorporating humanist elements, such as the “relationships

between human societies and the natural” environment. Landschaft emphasizes the

process of people passing on cultural elements into the landscape, such as houses, farms,

and cemeteries. Sauer, who was influenced by the German geographers studying

Landschaft viewed historical geography as the consideration of change in cultural

landscapes which “involves the reconstruction of past landscapes.” Sauer believed that

the “geographic expressions of culture” such as mines, roads, pastures, and buildings

could not be analyzed without attention to the people who made them. Barrows’ ideas on

historical geography evolved to that of “geography as human ecology,” which he

presented in area studies that focused on the “formulation of the man-land tradition.22

Similar to Sauer’s ideas, Ralph Brown viewed historical geography as the “influence of

beliefs and images on the history of settlement and change.” Later in the twentieth

century, Donald Meinig utilized and further developed the concept of landscape as

Landschaft in his seminal four volume work The Shaping of America,24 each volume of

which looks at the geography of a portion of United States in the context of that era’s

history.

The beauty of landscape as Landschaft is that the landscape need not be limited to

a large area. In fact, smaller areas of landscape study can be equally interesting subjects

of study, as evidenced in Broek’s sequent occupance analysis of the Santa Clara Valley in

California, and even smaller yet as Robert Brown’s areal examination of sequent

occupance in the small town of Upsala, Minnesota.26 After descriptions of each of four

eras Brown defines for Upsala, he describes the towns economic areal organization, the

business district, goods and services, and agriculture. He then describes the political areal

organization addressing boundaries at the city, township, state and federal levels, and

finally social areal organization which briefly mentions church membership, recreation,

and sports.27 Robert Brown also recognizes that cultural influences provide a framework

within which occupants view and use the resources of the area, including the way in

which new technologies create opportunities to exploit potential resources and thereby

influence land use.29

Criticisms of the Landschaft discourse include Leonard Guelke’s response to

Sauerian thought, arguing that the historian does not “recreate or reconstruct the past as it

actually was,” rather he creates an account of the past based on selected facts. Henderson

presents the idea that Landschaft describes a place the way it was, omitting the conditions

of life in the current time, a “not-landscape” that is lost in time and is not very useful for

the present or future.

During the 1920s and 1930s American geographers used postpositivist research

methods in their works, particularly by granting more attention to primary source

materials. Landscape as Landschaft as a methodology relies heavily on a determined

problem described within the context of theory, as well as empirical facts from sources

such as maps, interpretation from field work, and archival materials,33 and in more

modern times on air photos, remote sensing, newspapers, official records and reports, and

diaries. Ralph Brown’s writings, for example, made use of in-period resources and oral

history. His book Mirror for Americans was written through the eyes of an early

nineteenth century author, only making use of source material that would have been

available to an author of that time. His Historical Geography of the United States relies

primarily on “eyewitness accounts and contemporary maps” for primary source material.

Sauer’s approach, known as the Berkeley/Sauerian school of thought, involved field

research, the study of cultures and landscapes (particularly of indigenous peoples), and

the spread of domestic plants and animals.

Henderson’s second discourse is landscape as social space, which is simply

human-made space wherein the landscape is what came before, what is there now, and

what will come later, but with particular focus on the now. Unlike Landschaft, social

space emphasizes the change in space, or area, over place.38 J. B. Jackson is the primary

geographer who established the landscape as social space idea. Social space, in Jackson’s

view, builds from the Landschaft and Sauerian schools because it looks at landscape with

respect to cultural influence, but does so in the present with ordinary, vernacular

landscapes. He adds a dialectical element to the method by incorporating social theory,

such as the influences that individual experience and shared cultural ideas have with each

other.

Social space, then, uses the same types of postpositivist methods employed in the

Landschaft discourse, but also incorporates the constructivist methodologies, particularly

where they concern the views of the individuals in the landscape. Again, as with the

Landschaft discourse, social space makes use of the same primary sources such as field

work, maps, and archival information for empirical evidence. Qualitative sources,

specifically for evidence on individual experience, such as interviews or oral history are

used for the constructivist aspect. Major criticisms offered by Henderson include that fact

that social space can be too rooted in the now, without offering a “conception of how

things ought to be.” Also, while the social space method makes claims about the social

and cultural processes in the context of landscape, these processes are not caused by

landscape, they are merely a part of it, and cannot be an argument for the study of

landscape.

Henderson’s third discourse is the epistemological landscape, which looks at

“landscape as the material revelation of human practice and thought.”43 The epistemology

school is almost entirely constructivist, explicitly stating that “landscape tells us

important things about who we are as a society and a culture. Time-geography, first

promoted in Sweden by Torsten Hägerstrand, is an example of the epistemology

landscape, that views the way social events are structured through time and space.

Edward Soja and Allen Pred are two of the leading geographers in this realm of historical

geography. Although these epistemological geographies use empirical data sources,

particularly statistical information, the core arguments come from constructivist

assumptions and Marxian perspectives of social theory.

Henderson calls his fourth discourse the apocryphal landscape which looks at

landscape as ideology. The landscape as ideology school looks for symbols and

representation of landscape in art and literature to distill their meaning and messages. The

idea is that the meanings humans give to landscape elements in art and literature can be

materialized in actual landscape design. Taking this idea a step further, the ideology of the

landscape employs humanist perspectives, making the landscape into a text and a subject

of study. Denis Cosgrove and John Stilgoe have idealized landscape in the context of

capitalism, respectively as a “lie we live with” and a “truth we have lost.”52 Ideological

landscape studies use narrative forms, such as literature and poetry, for empirical sources

and apply social theories as evidence as the context within which to discuss the

landscapes.

Landscape

An evaluative aspect of a historical geography necessitates a closer look at

landscape. Landscape, according to Meinig’s distillation of Jackson’s publications, has

seven intrinsic concepts, such as being “anchored upon human life” and being “a

wholeness, an integration, of community.” The idea is that the landscape is a place shaped

by the people just as the people are shaped by the landscape, which is addressed in a

cultural and social context for Minnesota by John Adams, Robert Brown, and

Hildegard Binder Johnson.

When describing a region, geographers commonly use the term “landscape,”

which as Baker notes, has had its own history of debate over the meaning of the term, so

much so that geographers tend to define the meaning of landscape for the context of their

studies. Broek, for example, states that the term cultural landscape has been used in the

literature to set it apart from the concept of natural landscape, but prefers to use the term

landscape without a modifier, because to him the aspects of cultural occupance in a

landscape are interwoven with the natural landscape, each influencing the other.

Landscape geography may be seen as “an art and science of visual perception”

which interprets the significance of cultural expressions in landscapes.”59 In a broader

context, landscape and the factors that influence its change in rural settings, such as

multi-functional land use, are addressed by Martin Dijst, and Paul Chris Groth and

Wilson. Gary Peterson and Lowell Bennion define landscape as the “distant view” of an

area, and prefer the more focused term of townscape for use in describing the “more

intimate scene including less of the ‘setting’ and more of man’s doings.”

John Adams, Joel Koepp and Barbara VanDrasek explore landscape change from

a specifically rural perspective for Minnesota, which shows a trend in suburbanization

and population growth in some rural areas for regional centers, one of which is Mankato.

Edward Hassinger, Gerald Hodge, and Kalevi Rikkinen66 also deal with aspects of

landscape change, particularly population change with distance from services and the

sustainability of small towns. John Frasier Hart, Neil Salisbury and Everett Smith argue

that small U.S. villages are actually thriving and growing despite their decline in services,

although Rikkinen points out that distance from larger urban centers and services does

have a correlation to the size, growth, and viability of a village.

Society, Community and Culture

Understanding the social aspects in cultural geography is essential to a cultural

landscape study. From the perspective of social science, society, community, and culture

have many meanings based on different theories. Society describes social life in the broad

context that humans are social and their lives “involve relationships to others.” It may

also mean the nation-state to which a person belongs, hence a person belongs to American

or Minnesotan society. Another concept of society is that of civil society which has less to

do with the nation-state and more with being self-organized outside of the rules

established by government. Society is different from community because society is an

impersonal joining of strangers to one another.

Like society, community as a concept has multiple definitions, but is generally

accepted to mean small-scale, delimited groups of people with personal interaction,

traditions, and “strong affective ties.” In the nineteenth century, community was seen as

an image of the good life or the way life ought to be, making it an ideology toward which

people should strive. In more modern times, sociologists view the concept of community

as a “receptacle of values” which struggles against the “perceived threats of modernity”

and use it as a measure of modernization and social change. Landscape study includes the

idea of place which has humanistic qualities pertaining to people’s perception of

community. The exploration of the historical geography of Good Thunder incorporates

these humanistic qualities of community and place, allowing it to survive and remain

somewhat unique among Minnesota villages. The Northwest Minnesota Foundation

identifies three different qualities of place, structural amenities, natural amenities, and

stress reducer qualities, that are important aspects of Good Thunder’s sense of place.

The notion of culture also has a number of different contextual meanings

particularly in ethnography and anthropology. Edward Burnett Tyler, the author of the

anthropological definition, defined culture as the “knowledge, belief, art, morals, law,

custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.”

Franz Boas challenged this concept at the turn of the twentieth century, defining culture

as a response to “historical circumstances” that incorporates the diffusion of traits and

ideas from other groups. Cultural geographers generally agree upon a definition of culture

that means the “learned collective human behavior” that communicates “acquired beliefs,

perceptions, and attitudes,” or more succinctly as the “local, customary way of doing

things.” Spatial isolation is one theoretical approach to a community’s

“development of distinctive cultural, organization, ceremonial, and ritual forms.” In the

rural community, it is the ties to the land and sense of control through which the culture

develops a strong sense of space. Landscape study includes the idea of place which has

humanistic qualities pertaining to people’s perception of community. Good Thunder has

survived and remained unique among Minnesota villages through its sense of community

and place.

Cultural Communication

Social theory hypothesizes connections between communication and culture,82

one form of which is the oral, written, or visual narrative. Narrative functions as a

mechanism to preserve knowledge, to serve as a bridge to connect knowledge and

experience, and to understand and interpret culture. In doing so, narrative “binds people

to one another in social groups.” It is a synthesis of logic and emotion that depicts events

in order to “illustrate a truth or to create shared meaning.”

The art work in Good Thunder is its chief exemplar of community narrative,

incorporating cultural imprints such as the grain elevator or native limestone in the

presentation of its public art. John Bodnar addresses the idea of preservation of the

community memory through memorials, such as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and

commemorative celebrations, which Midwestern culture often employs with themes from

their cultural past like pioneers and Indians. The importance of Good Thunder’s art and

community memory is evident in the articles and essays published about the town’s art

work. In particular, Ann Christenson, Alice Vollmar, and Moira Harris90 write about the

mural painted on the grain elevator in 1987 and 1988 depicting historic scenes from Good

Thunder’s historic past, the community involvement and notoriety the art work launched,

and the resulting rebirth of community pride associated with the project.

“Whatever else it may be, historical and geographical interpretation remains, to an

important degree, an art.”

~Andrew Hill Clark

Chapter 2

Approaches to Historical Geography

Using Henderson’s four discourses of historical geography as a framework, this

historical geography of Good Thunder falls mostly within the realm of landscape as

Landschaft, incorporating areal elements of landscape as social space coupled with social

theory to discuss the village’s current place in time within the timeframes of five different

eras. I structure each era in a chronologic manner to present the areal and cultural

manifestation of human activity as an overview of Good Thunder’s social space,

discussing elements of community and culture which qualify the era. I construct these

qualities out of the empirical data in the model of a sequent occupance landscape study by

blending historical research, oral history, and the rhetorical interpretation of photographs

and maps through grounded theory. Following this, I discuss the developments in

transportation infrastructure which affect the time period under examination. Finally, I

describe the sequent occupance of human cultural structures, utilizing photographs to

portray them within their eras.

Sequent Occupance

The village of Good Thunder lends itself to an analysis primarily based on sequent

occupance, which is a methodology historical geographers employ to describe landscape

transformation in successive time frames as the landscape is modified by successive

groups of occupants through time and develops personality. Broek defines three

distinguishing domains for a study of landscape modification, which are “alterations in

the areal division of water,” “successions in vegetational cover,” and “changes in

manufactured structures.” My focus is on Broek’s third phenomenon, the changes in

manufactured structures. I present the cultural landscape of each era using empirical data

and applying appropriate aspects of Lewis’ seven axioms for reading a landscape, which

are: 1) the human-influenced landscape provides evidence of the people we are, were, and

are becoming; 2) objects in landscapes reflect human culture; 3) by nature landscapes are

difficult to study by academic standards; 4) history is important for explaining the

meaning of contemporary landscapes; 5) landscape elements make little sense outside of

their spatial context; 6) cultural landscapes and the physical environment are intimately

related; and 7) objects in a landscape convey many kinds of “messages,” but not in an

obvious fashion.

I reconstruct the cultural landscapes of Good Thunder in a chronologic manner to

present the “areal expression of human activity,” modeling the methodologies of Broek

and Robert Brown works on sequent occupance. Robert Brown’s historical geography

provides a model for sequent occupance based on eras of time and areal organization in

Upsala, Minnesota. Robert Brown divides Upsala into four eras: Indian occupance,

pioneer occupance, mainstream twentieth century occupance, and the modern era, and

follows this description with the social and cultural aspects separated into economic

(industry and agriculture), political (boundaries and institutions), and social (religious,

educational, and recreational) areal organization characteristics. The social-space aspects

of the methodology for Good Thunder are modeled after William Hoskins and J. B.

Jackson, in that I concern myself with the landscape of the era in its context with the

social and cultural dimensions of the landscape.11 I portray the ideas of social

construction and culture in narrative form within the five selected time frames through

grounded theory by analyzing historical facts, census data, and social theories to describe

the social context of the different eras.

I divide the occupance history of Good Thunder to present five categories or eras,

similar to the model used by Robert Brown in his sequent occupance study of Upsala,

Minnesota. However, I include the aspects of areal organization within each occupance

era, rather than in separate sections afterward as Robert Brown does. I define the

occupance eras of Good Thunder as: 1) Indians and Pre-Settlement: European

Exploration and the Winnebago Reservation, 1680-1863; 2) Pioneers and Settlement: The

Halcyon Days of Yore, 1864-1900; 3) Good Thunder in the Modern Age, 1900-1950;

4)The Dying Community, 1950-1975; 5)The Phoenix Saga: Metamorphosis through

Culture, 1975-2005. I chose the time span of each era based on significant events in the

history of Good Thunder with some arbitrary application of end-of-era dates. The

significant events I chose in order of each era previously listed are the removal of the

Winnebago in 1863, the pause in landscape development at the turn of the twentieth

century, the cessation of passenger train service in 1951, and the decline of the business

district in the mid 1970s along with the abandonment of the railroad in 1978.

Historical Research and Empirical Data in Sequent Occupance I collected

empirical evidence through historical research of primary source materials such as plat

maps, historic photographs, histories, official village records, newspaper articles, census

data, and archival resources to select, analyze, and synthesize events, facts, and dates that

serve to reconstruct the cultural landscape in the five different eras in history. The

minutes of the Good Thunder Improvement Club, an informal business association, and

the minutes of the village council14 meetings provided a starting point for collecting data

on significant Good Thunder events, particularly with respect to the social and cultural

climate of the times. The Good Thunder Herald newspaper, its successors, and

newspapers from nearby towns provided a record of events deemed significant through

the eyes of the village residents and their neighboring communities from which the basis

of the structure of events can be reconstructed. Because the newspaper began in 1891, I

had to use secondary resources to reconstruct events previous to that time, in particular

the History of Blue Earth County by Thomas Hughes, the archival papers of Sidney

Kienitz, publisher of the Herald from 1954 to 1972, and The Heritage of Blue Earth

County edited by Julie Hiller Schrader. To further supplement these resources, I examined

the Blue Earth County directories published between 1881 and 1975 at more or less five

year intervals through 1900, and then at ten year intervals through 1975 as available

volumes would allow. From these directories, I recorded the names of businesses in Good

Thunder for that year. These directories generally provide the name of the business owner

and the type of business, only sometimes listing or providing the business name. On

occasion I make assumptions that a particular personal name was a business based on the

knowledge I have learned during the research. With this data, I fill in gaps and identify

some structures within specific eras for the sequent occupance.19

To describe the cultural and ethnic background of the original settlers of Good

Thunder, change in population over time, and agriculture as the natural resource base, I

draw on data from the census records between 1870 and 2004. I use the census schedule

of 1880, the first one available after the founding of Good Thunder, to tally the number of

households. I create the description of origins of the early population by extracting the

birth place of residents from the schedule to indicate the origins of foreign-born residents

and the origins of all the village residents.

To generate the ethnic background of the population, I extracted the birth place of

the residents’ parents as enumerated in the census. I coded Prussia, Württemberg, and

Baden as Germany, England, Scotland, and Wales as the United Kingdom, Connecticut,

Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont as New England, and the Dakota

Territory, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin as the Midwest. I grouped New York

and New Jersey together, as well as Pennsylvania and Ohio based on the assumption from

historical knowledge that their original settlers were similar within these groups and

distinct from each other and New England. I left Canada, Sweden, and Ireland as separate

codes, as well as Minnesota, primarily because the Minnesota births represent the

children born in or near Good Thunder to the original settlers. After coding these ethnic

groups, I used Microsoft Excel™ to generate pie charts for a graphical representation of

the population.

I compose a picture of agriculture and animal husbandry as it relates to Good

Thunder and Lyra township, I extracted census of agriculture data for Blue Earth County

related to grains and cereals, dairy production, and hog farms. The data types I chose are

based on the statistical data available in the 1890 census of agriculture. The data provided

in the census of agriculture changed from edition to edition, sometimes splitting spring

and winter wheat, or feed and other corn, for example, so some of the totals are combined

for some years. The point of the data tables providing the agricultural data is not to

examine the agricultural practices of Blue Earth County; Donald Straub examined this

19 Tim Coles and Gareth Shaw, “A Sign of the Times: Scandinavian Town Directories as Sources for Urban

Historical Geography,” Geografiska Annaler, ser. B, Human Geography 79, 2 (1997).

topic in great detail for the period between 1910 and 1950. Rather, the agricultural data I

assembled serve to illustrate changes in the cultural landscape, such as the decline of the

creamery business or the relationship of mechanized farm implements and the amount of

field crops harvested.

In order to analyze the residential areas of Good Thunder, I extracted the parcel

data from Blue Earth County Assessor Office online database into an Excel™

spreadsheet. The spreadsheet lists the parcel number, platted location of each residence,

and the year the dwelling was built, along with the street name and house number. These

data allow me to determine the number of dwellings existing today and to determine in

what part of the village most of the construction took place for each of the five eras. The

database also provides photographs for the majority of the homes, some of which I

reproduce in the text.

I also make use of historical photographs in the collections of the Blue Earth

County Historical Society, the Minnesota Historical Society, and the Southern Minnesota

Historical Center, as well as some historic photographs from published works and from

some residents of Good Thunder as empirical data. I personally photographed the modern

images of the landscape using an HP Photosmart™ 850 digital camera at 4.1 megapixels

in July, August, and September of 2005. These photographs communicate elements of

place in time, and provide clues or insight into cultural influence and the occupance of

other structures within the Good Thunder landscape. Figure 2, for example, is a

photograph of the Community Baptist Church in Good Thunder, which illustrates how an

image may communicate information beyond the obvious subject of the composition. The

second building to the right is another church, easily identified by the peaked window just

under the tree branch. As data, the photograph provides a visual representation of the

Baptist church as it appeared in the 1940s and 1950s and supports the claim of a cultural

imprint on the landscape as a house of worship for the Baptist community at this point in

time.

Figure 2: Community Baptist Church, Good Thunder, Minnesota, ca. 1952 (Photograph

from the collection of the Minnesota Historical Society.)

Previous and subsequent photographs of this building demonstrate how the

occupance, use, and location of the building changed through time, when it was used

previously as the Episcopal church, and today as a private residential home after the

building was moved north and west one block. Furthermore, the building design provides

empirical evidence of the “old stock American” cultural imprint on the landscape. Built as

an Episcopal church, the building shows that the settlers of Good Thunder brought with

them the cultural habits of New England, using typical New England religious meeting

house architecture in their new landscape. As the Baptist congregation has a familial

relationship to the Episcopalians, in that both congregations are usually “old stock

Americans,” it follows that the Baptists would buy a church building closely associated

with their religious culture, rather than constructing another building.

Photographs such as fig. 2 serve as empirical evidence for sequent occupance and

placement in the landscape. The church window on the building to the far right of the

image demonstrates occupance of another church building on the same street during this

era. In conjunction with other data sources, I use the data from this photograph to

construct the occupance history of the building in the following manner: the 1910 village

minutes book lists property owners by plat assignment identifying the location of the

Episcopal church; the Episcopal church records state that the church building was sold to

the Baptists in 1946; this image identifies it as the Baptist church; and the 1914 plat of the

village, which shows the building’s location without naming the structure, identifies the

location of the building to the right as the German Lutheran church. Because the Baptists

had three different church buildings throughout their tenure in Good Thunder, and from

the date of the photograph, I am able to place this picture on a specific temporal and

spatial location.

Rhetorical Interpretation of Photographs and Maps

Photographic images and maps are an important, if not essential, tool long used in

developing a historical geography of a landscape to reconstruct past landscapes. As a tool,

photographs and maps are non-art pictures which serve to communicate information, as

opposed to art pictures which are used to express an aesthetic response. For the purposes

of the Good Thunder historical geography, I used historic and modern photographs,

historic maps, and created maps as non-art pictures as interpretation devices for viewing a

historical setting, and as narrative devices which communicate a story within a cultural

and historical context.

Pictorial perception is similar to perceiving real-world objects, on the one hand,

and as a learned response on the other. My interpretations of the images in this thesis

entails what I already know about the scene and the history of the village as well as my

interpretation and assumptions of the culture of the village at the time the photographs

were taken, not to mention my own cultural background.26 Such cultural interpretations

are evident not only in the information I provide in the narrative explanation of the

photographs, but also the information I chose to openly or unknowingly omit.

Consequently I interpret the photographs and place them within the narrative of

the thesis with a specific purpose in mind, applying aspects of Foss’ proposed

methodology for the rhetorical interpretation of non-art images. The elements of Foss’

proposal include: 1) the function of the image; 2) the assessment of the communication of

that function in the image; and 3) the assessment of the function’s legitimacy with respect

to the purposes of its use. I have adapted this methodology not only to analyze the

rhetorical situation (audience, purpose, and context), but also to select the images I used

and their positions within the narrative.

I also use photographs, alone or in comparison, to research and document the

historical setting of Good Thunder’s landscape and its change through time. I drew

cultural conclusions from a rhetorical interpretation of the photographs and maps,

particularly when comparing similar scenes in different times. This is an important

critical evaluation within a description of a historical landscape, because elements of the

culture of the people who built Good Thunder and took the historic photographs or made

the maps suggest the importance of the structures in the images.

The use and purpose of maps is similar to that of photographs in that both

communicate a representation of geographic reality. Maps are, however, different from

photographs because the map is entirely humanistic. Maps are drawn by humans, and

therefore incorporate selective and generalized features from a subjective and cultural

perspective, despite all the objectivity the cartographer attempts to achieve. As a

communication tool, maps represent a reality as an illusion or form of humanistic

expression not unlike poetry and literature, and contain metaphorical information in order

to communicate an experience of a place or landscape. In this manner, maps become a

visual narrative of the spatial extent it represents. When reading a map, the reader must

look at the map as a representation, rather than literal fact, and question the inclusion and

exclusion of the representations on the map.32

I use various maps of Blue Earth County and Good Thunder to aid in the spatial

organization of human structures while assembling the historical events. The maps I

create in this thesis serve to orient the reader visually and spatially alongside the

narrative. I also read historic maps for cultural clues of the time period. For example, the

Good Thunder plat map circa 1914 marks the locations of the post office, the train depot,

the lumber yard, the grain elevators, the livery, the creamery, the bank, and the Graham

House hotel, as well as the five churches. However, it does not show the location of the

second hotel, the schools, or the water tower, suggesting that it was more important to the

cartographer to identify key businesses in the village and that the other details were not

important.

Oral History

A portion of this thesis research involved human participants in the form of

informal interviews with village officials, business owners, and some long-time residents.

This provides historical information and clarification about occupance and location of

specific sites in the village. Oral history encompasses an array of information that, in

essence, is communicated verbally from a first-person experience in the form of a story.

This story is either relayed to the oral historian by a person who experienced the

information, or second-hand by a person to whom that verbal information was given. The

two-fold nature of oral history provides the researcher with information and detail about a

topic that a person would otherwise not record when writing about the same topic, and

“insights into how people felt about what happened.”

Good Thunder residents helped to identify business occupants of former store

fronts that are now private homes, the locations of past business, churches, and services,

and their perceptions of the community. The data I obtained in the interviews allowed for

the location of specific features on maps created with ArcView GIS™, the identification

of features in historic photographs, and the identification of known locations from which

to take a photograph of the current view of the same location.

An unanswered advertisement in the Maple River Messenger called for

information from residents. Since this failed to produce human participants, I recruited

participants by approaching the city office and by word-of-mouth. Potential risks to the

participants were minimal. Interview participants provided perceived historical

information, which I verified when possible and supported with other source materials,

such as village records and directories. I used inconclusive or unverifiable claims only

when appropriate and required. However, I do not present such claims as fact, nor do I

present them in such a way as to embarrass or otherwise cause undesirable social

consequences.

Grounded Theory

The primary thread that weaves the data together with these methodologies is

grounded theory. Grounded theory is an emergent process through which the researcher

immerses himself in the primary area of study and allows the relevant theories to surface

out of the data. Grounded theory has four central criteria: fit, understanding, generality,

and control. These criteria support the theory, because the theory is formulated from the

data, therefore making it true for the data, and serve as a guide in selecting literature for

review.

In applying grounded theory to Good Thunder, I formulate three distinct theories.

The first theory is that cultural substitution, the gradual replacement of a culture by

another, accounts for the disbanding of the Adventist, Baptist, and Episcopal

congregations in the religious sphere, the broadening and intermixing with nearby

communities by exposure to those communities through school consolidation in the social

sphere, and the reformulation of the natural resource base from the immigration of

commuter residents in the economic sphere.

Second, I posit that the community of Good Thunder has remained pragmatic,

building initially out of necessity based on cultural characteristics, such as the smithy,

livery, depot, hotel, general stores, churches, and schools. Later in Good Thunder’s

development, pragmatism is shown by careful use of existing structures, for example the

church congregations which bought other church buildings, the village government which

bought the old bank building for a village hall and fire station, and later made use of the

empty clinic for village hall, and the residents who converted church buildings for

residential houses, or moved existing buildings rather than building new.

Finally, I propose that Good Thunder’s community has always had, and maintains

today, a strong sense of community pride in its appearance and history. The early issues

of the newspaper through at least the 1910s always had a description of Good Thunder on

the front page, describing its beauty and promoting its resources. The formation and

almost eight decade existence of the Good Thunder Improvement Club, which worked to

promote the village, improve the roads and water works, brought baseball to town, caused

a medical clinic to be built, and created the annual Fourth of July parades, and later the

Pioneer Indian Days summer festival, is perhaps the strongest evidence of this. Good

Thunder also displays its pride in its name and its history in the murals in town, both on

the grain elevator and the outdoor silk painting, which portrays a reflection of the current

culture’s pride and reflection on their history.

“Landscape: ‘A portion of the earth’s surface that can be comprehended at a glance’.”

~John Brinckerhoff Jackson

Chapter 3

The Physical and Human Landscape

Tuan wrote that “humanistic geography achieves an understanding of the human

world by studying people’s relations with nature, their geographical behavior as well as

their feelings and ideas in regard to space and place.” The forces of nature are the primary

cause of the physical landscape, its soil composition, its waterways and water bodies, its

forests and prairies, and its wildlife among other aspects. Nevertheless, it is the people

who live on and use the landscape who shape it and change it to meet their purposes, but

only to the extent which the physical landscape will allow and bear. A discussion and

description of the physical and human landscape is a traditional, introductory method in

old-school historical geographies little used in more recent postmodern works. However,

the land and the cultures are integral parts of the character of Good Thunder. It is,

therefore, appropriate to begin that understanding by describing the physical landscape

within which Good Thunder lies.

Physical Landscape

The corporate limits of the City of Good Thunder today covers 0.6 square miles,

or 384 acres, of land (Map 2). The village is located in Lyra township, spanning the east

half of the north-east quarter of section 9 and the west half of the south-west quarter of

section 10 in township 106 North and range 27 West at an elevation of 990 feet above sea

level. In the coordinate system, Good Thunder is at 44.00° North latitude, 94.07° West

longitude, placing it near the geographic center of Blue Earth County. Blue Earth County,

in south-central Minnesota, is 481,920 acres in size, about 90% of which is in agricultural

use. Named after the Indian calque for the color of the waters of the Minnesota River,

Blue Earth County has more rivers than any other county in the state. These rivers run

through ravines incised through glacial till and commonly have thick stands of timber

along the bluffs.

The relief of the land in Blue Earth County is a result of a back-wasting, or

melting, continental glacier which deposited a deep layer of glacial drift on the

underlying bedrock, leaving behind a rich soil on lake plains and ground moraines. The

gently undulating topography of the county has very little extremes, with elevations

ranging from 1,000 to 1,060 feet, and relief from a few feet to 20 to 30 feet across the

county. The many rivers in Blue Earth County formed during the retreat of the

Wisconsin glaciation approximately ten thousand years ago. The rivers occur as gorges

Map 2: City Map of Good Thunder, 2003.

(Map adapted from Blue Earth County, Municipalities of Blue Earth County ([Mankato: Blue Earth County,

Public Works Department,] 2003).)

within the otherwise level ground of the lake plains and the gently rolling topography of

the ground moraines.

The continental climate of Blue Earth County is typical of southern Minnesota,

with cold winters and warm summers due to its central location in the North American

land mass. In the summer, winds from the south bring moist air from the Gulf of Mexico

providing approximately 70% of the region’s annual precipitation. The weather in winter

is influenced by north and northwest winds bringing masses of frigid, dry air, causing

winter precipitation to be light. The average annual snowfall in Blue Earth County is 37

inches. The spring and autumn seasons are transitional periods that have fewer

temperature extremes, but also contribute to periods of heavy fog on an annual average of

35 days.

Soils and Vegetation

The native vegetation of forest and prairie existing in Blue Earth County prior to

human settlement has heavily influenced the soil formation. The Le Sueur River forms a

boundary between the Big Woods, primarily composed of oak groves, to the north and

east and the tall grass prairie to the south and west, a major biogeographic divide in the

state of Minnesota. Maple, butternut, and black walnut trees dominate the river valley

slopes, with elm, basswood, and aspen along the river bottoms and wetter upland soils.

Other common vegetation exists in the form of shrubs like smooth sumac, prickly ash,

gooseberries, hazel, and chokecherry.8

The soils under the Good Thunder village area (Map 3) are predominately clay

soils in the west, trending toward a loam and clay mixture to the north, south, and east.

The majority of the village sits on four different soil series, many of which are subdivided

into series types based on differences within the series such as slope or flood frequencies.

The soil series upon which Good Thunder was built are the Clarion, the Comfrey, the

Dorchester, and the Minnetonka. The Clarion soil series are well drained soils forming

gently rolling to steep slopes in medium textured and moderately fine textured glacial till.

Typically the Clarion soils are on knolls and hillsides which supported a tall grass prairie.

The Comfrey soil series, which includes the Comfrey clay loam in Good Thunder, are

relatively young in the ten-thousand year scheme of soil formation, having formed in

medium to fine textured alluvium on stream flood plains. These soils are deep and poorly

drained, with a nearly level surficial extent. The native vegetation was aquatic grasses,

sedges, and willow trees. The Dorchester series is commonly found along the flood plains

of the Minnesota and Blue Earth Rivers and its tributaries, including the Maple River. It

is similar to the Comfrey soil series, except that the Dorchester soils are composed of

moderately well drained soils and medium textured alluvium, which supported tall grass

prairie and bottom land deciduous trees. Finally, the Minnetonka series is a poorly

drained soil type “in a mantle of fine textured and moderately fine textured lacustrine

sediments over loamy glacial till.” The Minnetonka is characterized by broad level tracts,

slight rises, and shallow draws in the high lands

(Map adapted from Soil Conservation Service, Soil Survey, Composite image from sheet nos. 64 and 73)

Map

il Map,

od Thu

nder

area,

1978

il Map Leg

r Selected So

il Ty

Com

frey clay loam

ari

on l

, 2-

% sl

ari

on l

, 6-

% sl

opes

ari

on l

, 12

Min

tonk

a silty clay lo

frey

loam

, freq

ode

354

Dorc

hester

, occasionally floode

Min

tonk

a silty clay lo

hest

er l

, 1-3%

which supported mixed deciduous trees and the “wet plant community of the tall grass

prairie.”

The Minnetonka series, Comfrey clay loam, and Dorchester loam series are all

rated in the city land use plan with a limitation of severe for dwellings with basements

and septic tank filter fields, meaning that the soil properties are not favorable for those

uses and require greater expense for preparation in construction. The Clarion loam is

divided into three sub-series based on slope, with the shallow slope rated as having a

slight limitation, the medium slope as a moderate limitation, and the steepest slope as a

severe limitation. The majority of the residential and commercial structures are built on

the shallow slope of the Clarion loam.

Agricultural Landscape

The soils in Blue Earth County are particularly fertile and provide Blue Earth

County with its primary natural resource base, which is field crops. Most of the land in

Blue Earth County is used for grain crops such as corn, soybeans, oats, wheat, and

barley.18 Corn has always been a primary cash crop in the county, rising steadily from 1.2

million bushels in 1890 to 27.7 million bushels by 2002, as shown in Table 1. Second to

corn until 1951 were oats, which rose to 3.6 million bushels by 1940 before declining to

56 thousand bushels in 2002. Soybeans surpassed oats during the 1950s, rising to 8.1

million bushels by 2002. In the period between 1890 and 1900, wheat was the major cash

Table 1: Grain Crops in Acres and Bushels for Blue Earth County

Census

Year

Barley

Corn

Oats

Rye

Soybean

Wheat

1890

Acres

4,148

42319

35,528

. . .

75,977

Bushels

110,951

1,286,275

1,329,254

295

. . .

1,375,050

1910

Acres

12,580

67,157

43,732

1,587

. . .

85,809

Bushels

280,765

2,532,182

1,487,907

25,896

. . .

1,471,598

1940

Acres

30,393

115,342

70,457

1455

. . .

12,622

Bushels

1,051,967

5,516,600

3,649,362

25,280

. . .

162,661

1964

Acres

165

147,309

22,224

437

119,899

10,937

Bushels

8,883

11,452,377

1,331,243

14,029

3,115,682

285,191

1978

Acres

541

162,132

5,612

. . .

160,664

5,219

Bushels

26,762

18,439,955

385,431

. . .

5,701,207

169,206

1982

Acres

329

166,165

4,866

. . .

158,660

7,944

Bushels

13,450

20,555,400

329,861

. . .

5,708,651

282,129

1996

Acres

. . .

172,241

868

. . .

178,915

1,047

Bushels

. . .

23,734,842

60,421

. . .

7,463,481

42,912

2002

Acres

. . .

176,541

876

. . .

165,342

763

Bushels

. . .

27,675,075

56,194

. . .

8,117,852

29,808

Sources: Data from Census Office, Report on the Statistics of Agriculture in the United States at the

Eleventh Census: 1890 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1895), 371: Table 14: Cereal

Products, by Counties; Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census of the United States taken in the year

1910. Abstract of the Census ... with Supplement for Minnesota (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing

Office, 1913), 664: Table 4. Value of all crops and principal classes thereof, and acreage and production of

principal crops, by counties: 1909; Bureau of the Census, United States Census of Agriculture: 1945, vol. 1,

part 8, Minnesota, Statistics for Counties (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1946), 51:

County Table II Specified Crops Harvested; Bureau of the Census, 1964 United States Census of

Agriculture, vol. 1, part 15, Minnesota (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1967), 322-323,

332-333: Table 13: Acreage, Quantity, and Sales of Crops Harvested: 1964 and 1959; National Agricultural

Statistics Service, Census of Agriculture [Internet database] (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of

Agriculture, n. d.), http://www.nass.usda.gov/census/, accessed 14 October 2005; Minnesota Crop and

Livestock Reporting Service, U. S. Dept of Agriculture, Minnesota Agricultural Statistics, (St. Paul:

Minnesota Dept. of Agriculture), 1997, 2003.

cash crop until rust diseases began to hurt the crops. By 1960 wheat fell to the fourth

largest crop harvested in the county.

Livestock products come in at a distant second in Blue Earth County’s agricultural

production. Non-poultry and non-dairy livestock farms generally decreased in number

over time, and by the end of the 1950s comprised only twenty percent of all farms. Hog

farms once held the lead in the livestock industry of the county. Although they are still the

primary food animals, cattle have surpassed hogs as the major income source from

livestock, trending away from dairy cattle and maintaining a level for beef production

through the 1950s.

Dairy production, once an important part of the economic base for the county, has

declined since the middle of the twentieth century, as shown in Table 2. Milk production

rose from 4.4 million gallons in 1890 to 13.4 million gallons in 1945 before gradually

declining to 7.1 million gallons in 1960. Other important dairy products were cream and

butter. Blue Earth County farmers produced 1.0 million pounds of butter in 1890,

however, that production quickly declined to a low of 1,395 pounds in 1945 and climbed

back into the low hundreds of thousands of pounds through 1964, after which butter

production was not counted. Cream production also rose in the first half of the twentieth

century, peaking at 3.7 million pounds in 1945. Thereafter only the number of farms

producing cream were counted, which dropped from 280 farms in 1959 to 73 farms in

1964. Other livestock farming includes sheep, for which the county ranks second next to

Faribault County in southern Minnesota, and poultry farms that produce eggs.

Table 2: Live Stock Products for Blue Earth County

Census

Year

Dairy Cows

Reported

Milk

Produced in

millions of

poundsa

Butter

Produced in

pounds

Cream

Produced

in pounds

(or farms)

Swine Sold

Slaughtered

1890

14,953

37.9

1,018,695

. . .

31,951

1910

28,009

27.2

647,760

80,551

30,686

1945

23,776

11.5

1,395

3,730,581

54,374

1959

8,719

4.6

318,090

(280)

127,628

1964

8,520

6.2

147,263

(73)

94,131

1978b

4,100

41.0

. . .

198,697

1982b

2,722

44.0

. . .

254,614

1996b

1,496

32.0

. . .

910,527

2002b

1,505

26.0

. . .

1,314,862

Sources: Bureau of the Census, Report (1890), 293: Table 10: Neat Cattle and dairy Products, by Counties;

Bureau of the Census, Report (1890), 334: Table 12: Miscellaneous Live Stock and Live Stock Products on

Farms Only; Bureau of the Census, Abstract (1910), 656-657: Table 3: Live stock products and domestic

animals sold or slaughtered on farms, by counties, 1909; Bureau of the Census, Minnesota Statistics (1945),

96-97: County Table III: Livestock and Livestock Products; Bureau of the Census, Minnesota (1964),

298299, 316-317: Table 10: Livestock and Poultry, 1959 and 1964; Table 12: Dairy Products and Poultry

and Poultry Products Sold, 1959 and 1964; Bureau of the Census, 1982 Census of Agriculture, Minnesota,

263:

Table 11 Cattle and Calves; Bureau of the Census, “Minnesota State and County Data,” 285: Table 12 Hogs

and Pigs; Minnesota Crop and Livestock Reporting Service, Minnesota Agricultural Statistics, 1997, 2003.

a Census statistics for 1890-1964 give milk production in gallons. The data are converted at the rate of 8.6

lbs. per gallon. Conversion information from the Wisconsin Dairy Board, “Milk Facts [Web site],”

http://www.wisdairy.com/wmmb_info/dairy_info/milkfacts.asp, accessed 13 October 2005.

Milk production statistics for 1978-2002 from Minnesota Agricultural Statistics, 1980, 1997, 2003.

Human Landscape

As in most areas in North America, Indians were the first human inhabitants of the

physical landscape. The Dakota Indians were the first known people to occupy what is

now Blue Earth County when Pierre Charles Le Sueur arrived there in September

1700, having lived in the forests and plains of Wisconsin and Minnesota. As

EuropeanAmerican pressures in New England and French traders in the Great Lakes

moved farther west, so too did the eastern Dakota, adopting some of the cultural traits of

the western Dakota, such as buffalo hunting, while continuing to maintain a woodland

culture. The land at the time was filled with game such as beaver, deer, raccoon, prairie

chickens, and buffalo. These animals, as well as nuts, berries, roots, sugar maple, and

wild rice were the natural resource base for their culture. The Dakota lived in semi-

permanent villages and lived a migratory hunter-gatherer lifestyle, hunting buffalo to the

west in the summer and living in the forests during the other seasons. As external

pressures moved the Dakota into different territories, their cultural adaptations to the

physical environment changed only slightly, primarily in the hunting of buffalo. However,

not all cultures adapt by adopting customs of nearby peoples when migration brings them

to a new locale.

The Winnebago lived near the Dakota in Blue Earth County for a very short

period of time, but they did not adopt the migratory hunting aspects of Dakota culture.

The Winnebago were a Siouan-speaking people with cultural practices not unlike the

Algonquians of the eastern United States. The Winnebago culture was sedentary. They

lived in wigwams as well as bark lodges, hunted game for food and practiced agriculture,

typically growing corn, squash, and bean. The Winnebago imprint on the landscape was,

however, minimal, probably owing to their very brief stay in the county.

It was during the mid-nineteenth century when European and European-American

settlers first began to actively change the landscape. Minnesota’s largest ethnic group

from 1860-1905 were German immigrants who principally settled in the Minnesota River

valley. Political unrest, such as the 1848 Revolution in Schleswig-Holstein, economic

depression, and overcrowding in cities prompted many Germans to immigrate to the

United States. Furthermore, the lack of a class system in America and the high social

standing of farmers in the United States during the nineteenth century proved to be an

attraction for immigrants from Germany. One of the attractions for settlement by

Germans in Minnesota, particularly in the Minnesota River valley, was the available land

which was already surveyed by the federal government, due in part to the Pre-emption

Law of 1841 which required frontier land to be surveyed before it was sold. Other

advantages of the Minnesota River valley area were the development of roads and the

rich agricultural land on the prairies which required little preparation because of the

landscape’s lack of trees thus making them prime fields for European agricultural

practices. The German settlers came from different areas of the Prussian Empire, bringing

with them their own diverse cultural habits, including both the Roman Catholic religion

and Protestant sects, which matured in the U.S. as the various Lutheran synods.

In addition to the German settlers coming to Minnesota, Irish immigrants and

European-Americans from New England and New York were the predominant ethnic

groups in the middle of the nineteenth century. These people also brought with them

distinct cultures and agricultural techniques, as well as the Catholic religion from Ireland,

and English forms of Protestantism. Typically, members of the Episcopal Church in

Minnesota belonged to the “old-stock Americans,” or people descended from white

European families, usually New Englanders of British descent, which were already

established for several generations in North America. Of the major “English”

denominations in Minnesota in the nineteenth century, only the Baptist church had a

membership that was not limited to old-stock Americans, and was brought to the region

by the people from the eastern Great Lake states such as Pennsylvania and Ohio.

The United States census of population in 1880 was the first enumeration (see

Appendix III) which included Good Thunder since its founding in 1871 and thus is the

basis used for the determination of Good Thunder’s population and ethnic background

analysis. The 1880 census for Good Thunder enumerates 149 residents in 37 households.

There were 41 males aged sixteen years or older, 48 females aged sixteen and older, and

sixty children under the age of sixteen. With a few exceptions in the enumeration,

children under the age of sixteen are primarily indicated as being in school, while those

sixteen and older had occupations such as dress maker or laborer.

Fully one-third (Chart 1) of the 1880 population was foreign-born, with the

majority of these people from Germany, one family from Sweden, and a few of Canadian

and Irish birth. The data (Chart 2) indicate that Good Thunder was settled rather equally

during its first nine years by German immigrants and “old stock Americans” with a

smattering of pioneers or others from areas in the Midwest looking for new

opportunities.42 By analyzing the place of birth of the residents’ parents in the census

schedule, two distinct cultural groups become evident. One cultural group is the German

population, overwhelmingly indicated in the census enumeration as Prussian, with a few

citations of birth in Württemburg and Baden. The other cultural group is the old stock

Americans from the eastern United States in New England and New York/New Jersey,

Pennsylvania and Ohio. By 1880, a full third of the total population had been born in

Minnesota (Chart 3), most of whom were the children born in or near Good Thunder prior

to and during the initial settlement period.

The demographics from the 2000 census (Chart 4) show several changes. First,

almost half of the population claim German ancestry, followed almost equally by Irish

and Scandinavian, with a few claiming other ethnic heritages. The data may be somewhat

misleading because forty-five percent of respondents reported only one ancestry and forty

percent provided multiple ancestries. This may account for the lack of English heritage

from the original old stock Americans, since cross-cultural marriages (e.g. Germans

marrying old stock Americans) and lack of knowledge of family histories skewed the

reporting. Another, more probable, reason may be that the old stock American families

simply moved to other locations, a hypothesis supported by the dissolution of the

Episcopal and Baptist churches in the 1940s and 1950s.

The overwhelming majority of Good Thunder residents in 2000 were born in

Minnesota (Chart 5) and half of the total population were over the age of 30. However,

only a little over half lived in the same house from 1995 to 2000 (Chart 6), while fortyone

percent lived elsewhere in Minnesota, the rest of the residents having moved from other

states or countries. These data indicate that almost half of the residents in Good Thunder

in 2000 moved from other areas, half of whom had commuting times between twenty and

thirty minutes, and another quarter with commuting times of more than one half hour

(Chart 7), all of which supports the claim that Good Thunder is now a bedroom

community. In all probability, some portion of those residents residing in that same house

in Good Thunder in 1995 and 2000 are also outsiders who moved in prior to 1995. Yet the

fact that almost ninety percent of the residents were born in Minnesota indicates that

Good Thunder attracts a predominance of people with a Minnesotan cultural background

and thus has a rather homogeneous cultural character.

42 Rice, 57.

Chart 1: Foreign Born Population 1880

Source: Data from the Bureau of the Census, Census of Population 1880.

Chart 2: Ethnic Background 1880

Source: Data from the Bureau of the Census, Census of Population 1880.

For

gn B

opul

n 1

ack

1880

d 5

w Y

w J

(

nd,

)

and

Chart 3: Population by Place of Birth

Source: Data from the Bureau of the Census, Census of Population 1880.

Chart 4: Ethnic Background 2000

Source: Data from the Bureau of the Census, “Data Sets with Quick Tables” for Good Thunder, Minnesota,

Ancestry: 2000.

Chart 5: Place of Birth 2000

l P

lat

ace

1880

anada 3%

nnes

ota 33%

t 21%

and 1%

any

19%

eden 1%

enns

ani

o1%

10%

ngl

and 11%

Source: Data from the Bureau of the Census, “Data Sets with Quick Tables” for Good Thunder, Minnesota,

Place of Birth and Residence in 1995 and 2000.

Chart 6: Place of Residence

Source: Data from the Bureau of the Census, “Data Sets with Quick Tables” for Good Thunder, Minnesota,

Place of Birth and Residence in 1995 and 2000.

Chart 7: Commuting Times

e o

nes

gn bor

outh 2%

heas

t 0.

t 8

ace o

Resi

dence i

1995 a

nd 2000

hous

1995 53

here i

1995

out

h 3%

nnes

a 10%

ue E

h Count

1995 31%

Source: Data from the Bureau of the Census, “Data Sets with Quick Tables” for Good Thunder, Minnesota,

Journey to Work: 2000.

Chart 8: Population Change, 1870-2004

Source: Data from the Bureau of the Census, statistical abstracts for Good Thunder, Minnesota; data in

tabular form in Appendix IV.

Population Changes Through Time

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During Good Thunders’ first nine years of existence, the village grew relatively

quickly from a population of two (the Grahams) in 1871 to 149 residents in 1880. This

growth in population continued through the year 1900 when Good Thunder topped 500

residents. Thereafter, the population declined, reaching its lowest point in 1920 of 314,

before leveling out in the upper 400s through the 1930s to 1970s. Lyra township also

shows a similar pattern, reaching its maximum population in 1880 of 900, a low point in

1920 after which the township grew briefly before beginning a steady trend of population

loss from 1930 to the present day. By 1970 the population of the township had fallen

below that of Good Thunder.

Several factors contribute to the fluctuations in the population over time. The

census data depicted in Chart 8 reflect the general trends experienced across Blue Earth

County. During the period between 1900 and 1940, the rural population of Blue Earth

County saw an overall decline, which continued from 1940 through 1960. This represents

a decline in the numbers of the farm population. However, the overall rural non-farm

population shows a growth trend from 1930 through the present day, particularly since

1940 as urban and farm families settled in the rural villages. These trends are indicative

of the cultural change in the United States as transportation became easier and more

reliant upon the automobile and more people began to work in urban areas, such as

Mankato. The trends in population are also typical for rural settings in the Midwest, as

small family farms closed or were incorporated into larger commercial farms.

Part II

Sequent Occupance

“The frontier has been . . . a series of secondary culture hearths, of differing origin and

composition, which there began their individual evolution.”

~Carl Sauer

Chapter 4

Pre-Settlement: European Exploration and the Winnebago Reservation, 1680-1863

Indians

Scholars do not know when the Dakota came to Minnesota, but they do know the

people lived in the prairies and forests of southern Minnesota when the French explorers

Daniel Greysolon, sieur Dulhut and Father Louis Hennepin arrived in the area between

1678-1680. Their arrival in Minnesota probably occurred as a result of intrusions from

eastern Indians into northern Wisconsin, who in turn were pressured to migrate due to

European settlers in the east.

Hughes’ description of Indian occupation of Blue Earth County before European

discovery is representative of nineteenth-century perceptions of Indians, abounding with

phrases like “not at all particular as to their food,” “not overly cleanly,” and “wholly

unaccustomed … to any restraint of law.” Nevertheless, Hughes provides one of the few

available histories available for Blue Earth County specifically. He writes that the

Dakota, also known as the Sioux, were the only known Indian inhabitants of the county.

The Dakota lived a nomadic life, traveling from the woods to the prairies and back again,

residing in tepees, hunting buffalo, muskrats, and other game which lived in the area, and

gathering berries, nuts, wild rice and other native edible plants.

For a time, the Dakota lived peaceably with European explorers and settlers as

they moved into the territory doing “little injury to the settler or his property.” The

relations between white settlers and the Dakota later degraded with the Dakota Conflict.

Also known as the Sioux Uprising, the conflict occurred in summer and autumn of 1862

as a result of the U.S. federal government not keeping its treaty promises with the

Dakota. The government did not send the promised money or food stipulated in the treaty

and the Dakota were facing starvation. Their anger with the government resulted in raids

on white settlers in and around New Ulm, Minnesota in which some four-hundred whites

were killed. The Dakota took some women and children as captives, and fought with the

U.S. Army at Fort Ridgely and Wood Lake when the U.S. defeated and captured nearly

two-thousand Indians. Although the white captives were released and the Army brought

the situation under control, the whites demanded the execution of all the Indians. An

appeal to President Lincoln from Bishop Henry Whipple resulted in a careful review of

the charges against the Indians. In the end thirty-nine Indians were executed on 26

December 1862 at Mankato. Then in 1863, the whites used the Dakota Conflict as an

excuse to remove Indians from Minnesota, opening their reservations for white

settlement.

First White Settlers

In July and August of 1854, John Ball and John Quigley from the office of the

Surveyor General of Iowa and Wisconsin surveyed what is now Lyra township. The

original survey map (Map 4) shows Lyra township as prairie land, indicated by the green

boundary, with a few wet small lands. The township is dissected by the Maple River in

its ravine, and traversed along most of its western edge by the Blue Earth River, both of

which are not labeled, probably because they were not yet named. The survey map also

shows no signs of habitation or agricultural fields from either land squatters or Indians.

The map itself displays the singular purpose of the surveyors, which was not to locate

roads or townsites, but rather to note the general quality of the land as well as natural

resources and permanent formations of interest, such as water courses, mines, mill seats.

This was the type of information pioneers desired for selection of land to purchase.

The first settler was Noble G. Root who arrived in September of 1854, very

shortly after the original survey had been completed. He built some log buildings on the

Maple River in the southeast quarter of section nine. Barnabas Simmons followed shortly

thereafter, also settling on the Maple River, in the southeast quarter of

Map 4: Original Survey Map of Lyra Township 1854

(Map adapted from Minnesota Land Management Information Center, “Original Public Land Survey Plats

of Minnesota” map for Lyra Township)

section thirty-three. However, both men and their families were compelled to abandon

their claims in 1855 when the government created the Winnebago reservation. Simmons

later returned to his claim before the removal and lived peaceably with the Winnebago.

The year 1855 saw many changes in the areal extent of Blue Earth County when the

Territorial Legislature gave portions of Blue Earth County to Le Sueur county. If

Hughes’ description of this land loss is indicative of the general sentiment of Blue Earth

County residents, the loss of land to Le Sueur “was not the worst.” A federal treaty with

the Winnebago signed on 27 February 1855 created a four-hundred square mile

reservation (map 5), thirty miles from east to west and thirteen miles north to south,

comprising the whole of McPherson, Medo, Beauford, Decoria, Lyra, and Rapidan

townships, with portions of the South Bend, Mankato, and Le Ray townships. Hughes’

description of territory loss due to the reservation depicts feelings of resentment, largely

because “half of the very best farm lands in the county,—about one-third of its total area,

— [was] taken from its very heart and given to the Indians.”

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Winnebago Reservation 1855-1863

The Winnebago people originated in east-central Wisconsin, speaking a Siouan

dialect and practiced customs similar to the Algonquin. At the behest of miners in

Wisconsin, the Winnebago were moved by the federal government to northwestern Iowa

after the Winnebago War in 1827. Between 1827 and 1855, the government forced the

Winnebago people to move three more times, twice to areas in northern Iowa along the

Yellow River and the Turkey River, and again in 1848 to Long Prairie, Minnesota. By this

time, the Winnebago were frustrated with the moves and had to be forcibly removed by

soldiers from Long Prairie. In 1855, Congress again elected to move the Winnebago,

numbering about 2,000 at the time, to a new reservation created in the heart of Blue Earth

County, where the village of Good Thunder is located today. The Winnebago lived all

over the reservation area in small groups or clans, each headed by a chief, and lived

peaceably amongst themselves and with the white settlers surrounding the reservation.

Chief Wakuntchapinka, or Good Thunder in English, settled his family and clan of some

one-hundred Winnebago along the Maple River at the present site of the village of Good

Thunder. The site on the river became known as Good Thunder’s Forde because it is a

shallow, easy crossing in the Maple River. During the summers Wakuntchapinka’s clan

lived on the hill west from the river upon land now occupied by the public school and

farmed the land between the hill and the river. During the winters, the clan settled near

the ford and also lived in the log buildings built by Root on his homestead.

By the time of the Dakota Conflict of 1862 white settlers had realized that the land

in Blue Earth County, particularly that now occupied by the Winnebago

Reservation, was some of the richest, most productive soil for farmland in the country.

Although the Winnebago took no part or side in the Dakota Conflict, anti-Indian

sentiments among whites made it easy to use the Conflict as an excuse to evict the

Winnebago from the Reservation for white settlement and farming. Thus in 1863, the

federal government once again removed the Winnebago, with a culture and subsistence

based on forest resources, and forced them to a desert reservation at Crow Creek in the

Dakota territory, now known as Fort Thompson, South Dakota. The Winnebago were

shipped by steamboat down the Minnesota River to Fort Snelling, transferred to other

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steamboats down the Mississippi River to St. Louis, where they were transferred again

for the journey up the Missouri River to the new reservation. The trip was long and

arduous, causing many of them to die en route.

Imprints of Winnebago on Good Thunder appear to be non-existent today.

Although William Hall stated that their burial ground was located “on one of the round

knolls in the bottom land just north of the present highway leading from Main Street to

the bridge,”6 it is not located on any known map, nor does there appear to be any footprint

evident on the land. Residents claim that arrow heads were found in abundance on the site

of the summer camp ground where the public school stands today. During the tenure of

the Winnebago clans on the reservation, several sites had Winnebago names, such as

Winneshiek township to the east of Lyra, and Good Thunder’s Forde. After the

Winnebago removal, whites changed the names of many sites with Winnebago names,

such as Winneshiek township to Beauford.8 The site of the ford on the Maple River

continued to be known as Good Thunder’s Forde, perhaps because Barnabas Simmons

lived for a time with the Winnebago, or the fact that Wakuntchapinka counseled against

aiding the Dakota in the uprising and became known to whites as a “good Indian.”

Whatever the reasons, Good Thunder kept its Indian appellation, which has been a source

of pride throughout its history, and the name itself would later become a key component

in keeping the village alive and prospering.

We will be known forever by the tracks we leave.

~Dakota Proverb

Chapter 5

Wakuntchapinka and Wakinyanwashte, the Two Chiefs Good Thunder:

A Biographical Interlude

Good Thunder is a calque, or direct translation, of the personal names

Wakuntchapinka (Winnebago) and Wakinyanwashte (Dakota). No history or discussion

of the village Good Thunder is complete without the story of who the eponymous Indian

chiefs were for whom the village was named. The name Good Thunder is as important in

influencing the cultural development of the village as any other factors which shaped the

personality of the village. The annual Pioneer Indian Days celebration, the peace park in

town, and the monument at the ford on the Maple River are all direct results of the Indian

name and historic peaceable relations with the Indians of the reservation. The name has

also had influence beyond the village itself. Its reputation as an art community in the

1980s made it an ideal choice for lending its name to Minnesota State University,

Mankato’s Good Thunder Reading Series, an annual series of lectures and readings given

by emerging and established Minnesota and Midwestern authors.

The story behind the name seems to have been lost to the collective memory of

Good Thunder at least once throughout the village’s history. The St. John’s Lutheran

Church centennial anniversary book from 1970, for example, gives the following account

of the name origin. According to the story, Indians from South Dakota, suffering from a

long drought, moved east and camped in the present location of Good Thunder. That

night a thunderstorm occurred which the Indians took as a happy omen and called out

“Wa-Ke-An-Washta” or good thunder. It also happened, according to the story, that a son

was born to the chief that night who was given the name Wakeanwashta. Although the

church’s story has some good dramatic elements indicative of oral traditions, the actual

story is quite different. A 1947 newspaper article in the Good Thunder Herald states:

“The source of the name of our village has been shrouded in doubt to some extent

because there were two chiefs by the name of Good Thunder.” It goes on to briefly

discuss both Wakuntchapinka and Wakinyanwashte.

Wakuntchapinka

Good Thunder’s Forde was the common name of the fording at the Maple River

just east of the present site of the village during the middle of the nineteenth century. The

early pioneers called the ford by this name, because the Winnebago chief

Wakuntchapinka and his clan lived at the site of the ford and the present site of the school

between 1855 and 1863 when Blue Earth County was home to the Winnebago

Reservation. Very little is known about Wakuntchapinka’s life, nor even what he looked

like, as there are no known portraits of him; thus the Winnebago village beneath the cloak

Figure 4: Andrew Good Thunder and a Winnebago camp

The image of Andrew Good Thunder comes from an existing photograph. Chief Wakuntchapinka is

represented as the Winnebago camp. (Photograph by author)

of Wakinyanwashte on the grain elevator mural was used to represent Wakuntchapinka.

Most of the biographical information comes from a reminiscence of William Hall, a

representative in the state legislature for the district in which Blue Earth County lies.

Wakuntchapinka was probably born in Wisconsin in the native territory of the

Winnebago people. In 1832 he lived with his wife and three children at Fond du Lac,

Wisconsin. During the Black Hawk War in 1832 he is said to have fought on the side of

the whites and was a signer of the treaty with the United States that ended the war.

Wakuntchapinka also signed the treaty of 1837 in Washington, D.C., the terms of which

were for the Winnebago to cede their lands and remove to Turkey River, Iowa. The Indian

signers thought the treaty provided eight years for the migration, but it was eight months

in actuality. Between Wakuntchapinka’s first cited location in 1832 and his death in 1863,

he moved with each forced migration, from Fond du Lac, Wisconsin to Turkey River,

Iowa, then to Long Prairie, Minnesota in 1846, and in 1855 to the Blue

Earth County reservation. When the United States dissolved the Blue Earth reservation in

1863, the Winnebago were removed by U.S. soldiers and Wakuntchapinka died during the

journey.

Williams, as quoted by Hughes, as well as other white settlers, remember

Wakuntchapinka as a good man, “large of stature and well built,” who was fair in his

dealings with others, respected by his clan, and peaceable. These settlers especially

remember Wakuntchapinka for his role during the Dakota Conflict in 1862. In the early

part of the conflict, after the Dakota had raided and killed some of the white settlers,

envoys from the Dakota came to the Winnebago for help against the whites.

Wakuntchapinka, however, “councelled [sic] against warlike action and forbade their [the

younger Winnebago men of fighting age] listening to the Sioux promises telling them that

the ‘Great Father at Washington’ had always dealt kindly with them, that their white

neighbors were their friends, and that he could not listen to their murderous designs.”

Because of this counsel, the white settlers remember Wakuntchapinka as a “good Indian,”

and this may be a reason why, of all the other Winnebago names in Blue Earth County

that were changed after their removal, the name Good Thunder’s Forde remained.

Wakinyanwashte

The second man named Good Thunder was Wakinyanwashte, a Dakota Indian

born about 1819, who lived in the Lower Sioux Agency. It was there in 1860 that

Wakinyanwashte met Henry Whipple, the first Episcopal bishop in Minnesota, who

converted Wakinyanwashte to Christianity and baptized him in that same year as Andrew

Good Thunder. Like Wakuntchapinka, Wakinyanwashte played a significant role in the

aftermath of the Dakota Conflict.

In the summer of 1862, the Dakota Indians on the Lower Sioux Agency were

starving because the federal government had not sent the money or food promised in

various treaties, including the Traverse des Sioux Treaty of 1851. In desperation and

anger, some Dakota raided white settlements for food and supplies, killing some four

hundred settlers in the summer and fall of 1862. In the midst of the conflict,

Wakinyanwashte fought with the Dakota at Fort Ridgley against the whites, but he also

worked to save the lives of the whites, some two hundred women and children, captured

by the Dakota.19 Henry Sibley, commissioned as a colonel and given command of the

military force against the Dakota by Governor Ramsey, employed Wakinyanwashte as a

scout and envoy between the Dakota and U.S. forces. Sibley wrote of Wakinyanwashte in

an 1887 letter to John Graham of Good Thunder: “I gave him prominent position among

the Indian Scouts, and he justified my good opinion of him by a fearless and faithful

discharge of that dangerous service.” Nevertheless, when the federal government moved

the Dakota and Winnebago in 1863 from Minnesota to South Dakota,

Wakinyanwashte was obliged to go along.

In the late 1860s, Wakinyanwashte returned to Minnesota, purchasing some eighty

acres of farm land at Birch Cooley, near Morton, Minnesota, where he became a

successful farmer. He donated twenty acres of his land in 1886 to Bishop Whipple for the

Episcopal Church, upon which Whipple built the St. Cornelia’s Episcopal Mission

Church. Wakinyanwashte died in 1901 and was buried in the church’s cemetery at Birch

Cooley, which still stands today.

Figure 5: Andrew and Sara Good Thunder, 1887

(Photograph from Kienitz, Papers, “Souvenir [sic] of Good Thunder, Minnesota.”)

So far as historical sources show, Wakinyanwashte had never been in Good

Thunder until 1887. During that year, the citizens of Good Thunder planned a Fourth of

July celebration at which they wished to rededicate the town and have Wakuntchapinka

come to the celebration. Upon learning that Wakuntchapinka had died some years earlier,

the village also learned that another Indian by the name of Good Thunder lived a short

distance away. Thus Andrew Good Thunder was invited by the village elders for the

rededication ceremony in 1887. A man from Redwood Falls heard about the invitation

and wrote an inflammatory letter about Andrew Good Thunder to the village council.

Bishop Whipple learned of this letter and wrote his own in support of Andrew Good

Thunder, also requesting that then General Sibley write a letter of recommendation as

well. In his letter, Bishop Whipple said of Andrew Good Thunder: “Our dear Savior said

‘a man will lay down his life for his friends’—Good Thunder perilled his life to show his

gratitude for a race whom his people counted as enemies.” General Sibley also

encouraged the village to go forward with the rededication celebration, saying that

Andrew Good Thunder “deserves to have his name perpetuated in the manner you

suggest.” So it was that Andrew Good Thunder came with his wife by train to Mankato in

July of 1887, with tickets purchased by the village, and then by coach to Good Thunder

for the celebration. As the honored guest, he gave a speech to the village residents in the

Dakota language, which was translated by his interpreter,26 the full text of which is in

Appendix II.

The stories of these two men show why the village residents of Good Thunder

kept the name, especially with the letters of support from prominent leaders of the time,

when they could just as easily have changed the name of the village to something else.

The ties to their history are very important, and the attitudes of peace from both

Wakuntchapinka and Wakinyanwashte are undoubtedly the influence behind the historical

marker now standing at the ford on the Maple River and the peace sign post in the park

on Main Street.

Figure 6: Historical marker at the ford on the Maple River (Photograph

by author)

“The historical geographer . . . needs the ability to see the land with the eyes of its former

occupants, from the standpoint of their needs and capacities.”

~ Carl Sauer

Chapter 6

Pioneers and Settlement: The Halcyon Days of Yore, 1864-1900

Cultural Landscape

The height of Western expansion in the United States was a series of marked and

unsteady settlements, in various locales over a period of roughly fifty years, as white

settlers encroached upon Indian territories, or moved into those lands after federal

removal of the Indians. Surveyors mapped the land at an incredible rate, under public

pressures to make the land available. Pioneers from New England and immigrants from

Germany came into the new West looking for opportunities to exploit and control

resources for profit and to find farm land. To some degree this type of expansion in

Minnesota came later than in other parts of the West, probably due to the lack of railroads

in the region. Although well developed in the eastern United States, particularly in the

southern Great Lakes regions, railways did not reach into Minnesota until the end of the

1850s when the Milwaukee and Waukesha Railroad Company finally reached La Crosse,

Wisconsin and the Mississippi River in 1858. Thereafter, the inevitable railroad

expansion into southern Minnesota was all the promise and assurance needed for some

forward-looking pioneers.

The settlement in Blue Earth County also followed this broad American pattern.

After the Winnebago removal, white settlers began to move back into the territory

formerly occupied by the reservation, the first ones arriving in 1864 and settling on the

west side of the Maple River. The period between 1864 and the first few years after the

platting of Good Thunder in 1871 marked a short phase of isolated settlement with a few

family clusters here and there, as well as itinerant preachers. The year 1864, for example,

saw the first religious services in the area by a Baptist preacher at the home of M. L.

Plumb in section twenty-eight. Lashbrook and Gates built the first mill on the Maple

River in 1865, which was followed quickly by several more water-powered saw- and

feed-mills. By 1867 a log school house was built near the present townsite, providing

double duty as the Baptist meeting house.

When word came in 1870 that the railroad had reached Wells, some twenty-five

miles southeast of Good Thunder, Levi Houk, Clark W. Thompson, James B. Hubbell,

and John A. Willard arranged for the connecting line between Wells and Mankato to come

through the area, including a depot. These joint proprietors and owners of the land created

a townsite plan in 1870, and hired O. D. Brown, a civil engineer, to create the

(Map reproduced from The Standard Historical and Pictorial Atlas and Gazetteer of Blue Earth County,

Minnesota (Minneapolis: Central Publishing Co., 1895), 44.)

Map 6

wnship 18

official survey and plat in the west half of the northwest quarter of section ten in April

1871, which they named Good Thunder after the ford. During this time there were no

special permits or rules for platting a town. All a land owner need do was to provide a

local county office with a plat of any kind of design, commonly a linear grid with

rectangular lots and a few streets, to found a town. Houk, Thompson, Hubbell, and

Willard brought their plat to the county office in Mankato, where it was officially

registered on 26 August 1871. The plat consisted of ten blocks on the east side of the

proposed railway and an additional, unnumbered warehouse block.

Immediately following the creation of the Good Thunder plan in 1870, John G.

Graham, a mercantile merchant from New Hampshire in business in nearby Garden City,

purchased a lot on Main Street and built the first building on the plat, into which he and

his wife, Loretta neé Barnard, moved on 30 November 1870, becoming the first residents

of the village. Other settlers quickly followed and more stores were built on Main Street.

The settlers were industrious during those first years, filling the majority of the original

townsite to such capacity with homes, churches, and businesses that the Ewing’s Addition

was platted and added to the town in 1878 to make room for more houses and incorporate

the Catholic church. However, it would be another thirteen years before the people of

Good Thunder voted to incorporate on 2 March 1893 by vote of 79 to 14.

Map 7: Good Thunder Original Townsite Plat Map 1871

(Map reproduced from the original Good Thunder plat map in the possession of Blue Earth County,

Taxpayer Services, Maps Division.)

Newspaper articles of the times describe the rapid growth and creation of the

community in a positive light, suggesting that the settlers and town leaders were pleased

with their new landscape and that the community was as it ought to be. The Good

Thunder Herald published the following description of the town in 1882 which was

republished in the Mankato paper: “In looking about our little village we find that

substantial improvement is the order of the day. Henry Wiedenheft’s new store,

with iron roof; August Wendtlandt’s new agricultural depot; O. H. Austin’s shop

and windmill, Henry Lehman’s residence; Herman Darge’s residence; Lutheran

parsonage; A. F. Billet’s Harness shop; Fred Darge’s barn; and then we have a

chance in the mercantile business—Mr. Jul. Reim of New Ulm has purchased

Benj. Deuber’s interest in the firm of Sohre & Deuber. . . . Chris. Yenter has

opened a new harness hop on the corner opposite the hotel.

In the country near town we also note improvements. Henry Westemen is

building a brick residence; Thos. and Simon Garvin are receiving cars of stone for

residence improvements; O. Cassidy is building an addition to his residence.”

Another article from the Mapleton newspaper describes their neighbor to the north thus:

“Although the population of Good Thunder is about 350, still it has some wide-awake

and energetic business men within its limits. There are five churches; also a fine

graded public school. In the line of industries there is a flour mill and a creamery.

Good Thunder is not without a hotel and a newspaper. The former is run by Mr.

John Graham, while the latter is under the direct supervision of F. N. Griffin. The

hustlers in the hardware business are Blum & Schroeder. When we visited their

place of business a day or two ago, they were so busy attending to customers that

neither member of the firm had spare time to talk at any great length to the writer.

In answer to a question, one of the firm said: “You may say that we are doing our

share of business.” One of the neatest establishments in the place, is that run by

Mr. F. G. Malzahn. He has a smile of welcome as you enter the store that makes

one think that he is going to be treated on the square. Mr. Malzahn has many

useful articles on his shelves and he is in a position to dispose of the odds at a

reasonable figure. Of course there is a barber shop in town. It would not be

complete without such an institution. To be sure Good Thunder has a postoffice

and while there is a male post-master there is also an accommodating female

assistant on hand nearly all of the time. . . . When their new school building is

completed it will be one of the finest of its kind, in the state of Minnesota. It is at

Good Thunder that the Farmers’ Alliance of Blue Earth county assemble every

month to learn as to how the work of the party is progressing throughout the

district as well as from Atlantic to Pacific.”

Although the list of improvements and businesses are described almost casually, it

should be remembered that life in the late nineteenth century was still difficult, nor as

“perfect” as the newspapers made it out to be. There was no electric power for tools or

lighting, heating came from burning wood, and transportation was by horse and buggy.

Money was not something that many people had, so payment-in-kind was a typical

practice for many years, by farmers who brought chicken eggs or butter to trade in

exchange for other merchandise. Emil Meilicke, who arrived with his widowed mother,

older brother, and a cousin, recalls building their log house on their new property in the

winter. The house was unfinished in the upper story where he slept with “fresh air in

plenty.” The Meilickes’ first years were troublesome because of several years of heavy

rains causing poor harvests and making the roads muddy and almost impassable, at times

fouling and miring the horses. Meilicke also notes that it was sometimes difficult to

integrate because he did not speak English until later in his life, and had trouble learning

because the Germans would not speak English. Moreover, he was not always able to go to

school because he was needed on the farm and often met people only when he went to get

the post or during threshing season.20

The social life at this time probably centered as much on the church communities

as it did in the saloons. In the beginning of the village’s history Graham’s store “was the

center of attraction for all the young bloods… until Saxton opened the drug store and then

the headquarters changed.” There was also a coronet band, organized by Professor Howe

in 1875, which performed for several years. Other social interaction, however, was more

pragmatic, like the Grange established in 1872. The Grange was a secret society and

movement started by New England pioneers and modeled on the structure of the Masonic

order, allowing only Americans to join at first, then allowing all of the farmers in the

community to join after its first year to build its membership. This movement of farmers

was a protection mechanism from the monopolizing tendencies of merchants and railroad

companies. Grange members learned secret signs which they communicated to each other

if they saw a fellow Grange member being overcharged, alerting him to the swindle and

helping each other find better prices for goods.

In all likelihood, it was the strong presence and activity of the Grange that also

gave rise to the growth of the Farmers’ Alliance in Blue Earth County. Farmers began

forming Alliances in the county in 1881, the first of them in Sterling. By March 1882

there were nine Alliances, all of which met in Good Thunder to form a union called the

Blue Earth County Alliance. Another meeting was held in Good Thunder in June 1882,

and the Alliance had a celebration on the Fourth of July in the village in that same year.

When the Alliance met at Good Thunder on 1 September 1886, the members formed the

first Farmer-Labor political party in Blue Earth County and went about selecting

candidates for nomination to the state legislature.

Transportation

The transportation infrastructure is also an important part of the landscape, without

which Good Thunder could not have developed in the manner described. Although there

were roads leading away from the village, these were not especially well graded until early

in the twentieth century. The residents did, however, build an iron bridge along the road

leading east across the Maple River in 1875 to make passage over it easier.

For an agricultural community like Good Thunder, it was the railroad which

provided the core transportation need. Railroads were ready to provide that infrastructure

during this time, seeing the profit potential in providing shipping centers for farmers and

Figure 7: Good Thunder Train Depot, ca. 1900

(Photograph reproduced from Schrader, The Heritage of Blue Earth County, 238.)

Figure 8: Depot and Hyde Grain Elevator, ca. 1900

(Photograph reproduced from Schrader, The Heritage of Blue Earth County, 239.)

their harvests. Indeed, it was the arrival of the railroad in Wells that provided the

opportunity for Good Thunder’s proprietors to found the site and the Good Thunder

proprietors that gave the railroad company the opportunity to serve a village that would

almost guarantee business. The railroad made Mankato the leading and only market in

southern Minnesota for wheat by the 1860s, and the establishment of the railway through

Good Thunder to Mankato provided the village residents and farmers access to that

market and, beyond Mankato, to the country at large.

Not all went according to plan, however. The Chicago, Milwaukee, & St. Paul

Railroad was still a fledgling company in Minnesota, and the railway between Wells and

Mankato was not completed on schedule because of financial troubles. This caused some

unrest and rumors amongst the villages that the railroad would never be built, although

Good Thunder had developed into a healthy trading center without the railroad in its first

few years.

By 1874 the population of Good Thunder had risen to approximately seventy-five

to eighty people and the tracks were finally completed by the end of September. The first

official train ride took place on 29 September 1874, when contractors and railroad

officials rode from Mankato over the Red Jacket bridge to Good Thunder. Daily service

began immediately after tracks reached Good Thunder, with a round trip fare to Mankato

costing $1.40. Nevertheless, once it was built and operating, the Chicago,

Milwaukee & St. Paul enjoyed a time of good business: “The freight transactions on the

C., M. & St. Paul railroad for the past month are as follows: Freight received, 612,415

pounds; freight forwarded, 654,695 pounds. The charges on the same being $1889.87, an

increase of nearly $1,100, same month one year ago. This is a creditable showing of the

prosperity of our little village.” The depot, however, was not built until 1893. It was a

combination, 28 x 80 frame building, which had separate waiting rooms for men and

women with the baggage and ticket office in-between.

Map 8: Good Thunder Structures, 1870-1900

(Map by author; Digital plat lines courtesy of Bolton & Menk, Inc.)

Sequent Occupance: The Business District

The heart of the Good Thunder business district began on Main Street between

Front Street to the west and Houk Street to the east, with light industrial structures

situated in areas more convenient to their functions. For example, the two mills built in

the township in 1865 and 1866 were on the Maple River to make use of the water for

power. As previously mentioned, the first business was John Graham’s 16’ x 24’

mercantile shop on the north side of Main Street, which he built with lumber hauled by a

team from Mankato. He opened his store 3 December 1870 and among the wares in the

first sale were a broom, a pail and a dipper. Following shortly thereafter in February

1871, L. E. Saxton and his son John of Wisconsin, built a drug store of the same size as

Graham’s store, and A. S. Handy opened a blacksmith shop at the corner of Main and

Houk. Later in that same spring, B. S. Hawes, also of New Hampshire, built a 20’ x 20’

general store, which his son Charles opened. Overhead, Hawes built a hall which was

often used in the winter for social gatherings and dancing, and A.G. Meilicke settled and

opened a medical practice, probably from his home.

As the railroad tracks were laid and the anticipation of rail traffic mounted in

1874, John Graham, Cargill & Co., and Wood each built a warehouse along the rail tracks

on Front Street, and John Paul opened a lumber yard which stood on the corner of Main

and Halliday Streets on the west side of the tracks. Cargill & Bro. added another

warehouse in 1885, which measured 40’ by 60’. As trade began to grow and new arrivals

came to town, John Graham seized the opportunity in 1877-1878 to enlarge his store with

a 40’ x 40’ addition. He also built a hotel measuring 62’ x 50’, which he connected to his

store with a 24’ x 50’ hall. The hotel, known as the Graham House, was two stories tall

with a false third floor on the façade. Graham opened his hotel to the public with a grand

ball on the Fourth of July.

Figure 9: Graham House hotel and J. G. Graham Mercantile Co., ca. 1900 View

to the north and east.

(Photograph from Kienitz, Papers, “Souvenir [sic] of Good Thunder, Minnesota.”)

By 1881 the city directory listed twenty-five businesses, three of which sold dry

goods, groceries, and general merchandise, and another two sold drugs and groceries.

There were also two shoe and boot stores, a hardware store, two saloons, two hotels, a

harness maker, and three physicians.

Most of the buildings were made from and faced with wood until 1884 when

August Kuhne started a brick yard, the location of which is unknown. This new addition

to light industry in Good Thunder changed some of the building patterns after that point.

People began building their houses and shops with brick from Kuhne’s business. In fact,

brick was so popular that Henry Wiedenheft and John Graham both re-built their

Figure 10: North Side of Main Street at Houk Street ca. 1888

The second façade from the right is Deering Harvesting Machinery, the fourth is the Masonic Hall. The

building out of frame on the left is the post office. (Photograph from Kienitz, Papers)

respective shoe and general stores out of brick in 1885. Then in 1886 Charles Sohre and

F. C. Darge razed their stores to rebuild a new double block of stores 48’ x 75’ entirely

from brick, and August Wendtlandt built a double brick hardware store measuring 44’ x

60’. Further building and improvements on Main Street occurred in 1887 when August

Wendtlandt, Albert Ziegler and B. J. Mechelke built a brick business block with a

seventy-five foot frontage, fifty feet deep, and three stories tall with tenement rooms in

the second story.

As Good Thunder moved into the last decade of the nineteenth century, the village

residents added several completing touches to the landscape in support of its agricultural

resource base. One important business was the livery stable, a practical business for the

care of horses when visiting or shopping in town, since horses were the primary mode of

transportation. The first owner of the business was Samuel King, appearing in the Good

Thunder directory around 1890, and the stable was later operated by John Weir and his

brother. The livery stood behind the store fronts on the north side of Main Street and was

accessible through the alley from either Front or Houk Streets, and also offered draft team

services.

Another important industry was the cooperative creamery, built in 1890 at a cost

of six thousand dollars, which manufactured over one-hundred thousand pounds of butter

in 1891 and 1892. Frank H. Griffin began publishing the Good Thunder Herald primarily

as a mechanism to provide the community, particularly the Alliance members, with its

first regular, weekly communication of news from the world at large, Good

Thunder itself, and other neighboring communities. Griffin published the first issue on

Wednesday, 2 September 1891. Milling was also a common light industry in Good

Thunder and its surrounds. Several mills were built on the Maple and Blue Earth rivers.

Figure 11: Farmers' Co-Operative Creamery

(Photograph from Kienitz, Papers, “Souvenir [sic] of Good Thunder, Minnesota.”)

Figure 12: Cable Mill, ca. 1890

(Photograph from Kienitz, Papers, “Souvenir [sic] of Good Thunder, Minnesota.”)

One of the primary mills was the Cable Mill first built on the Blue Earth River in 1867. It

was moved to the top of the river bluff in 1888 and ran from a water powered wheel

which turned a cable reaching to the bluff top, hence giving the mill its name.

One of the last industries to develop in Good Thunder at the end of the nineteenth

century was the banking industry. Until this time people had been building without the aid

of a local bank, either traveling to Mankato with the train, once it was running, or

borrowing from wealthier residents or family. The village business leaders began talking

about organizing a bank in earnest in 1892. W. R. Wilmot, A. C. Wilmot, John Graham,

William H. McGrew, D. McCarthy, Wm. Ellis, and H. G. Detlaff organized the bank on 7

January 1893. The bank, soon to be known as the First State Bank of Good Thunder,

Figure 13: State Bank of Good Thunder ca. 1900

(Photograph reproduced from Schrader, The Heritage of Blue Earth County, 233.)

began with a capital stock of $25,000 from its stock holders.54 Not surprisingly, most of

the board of directors were old stock Americans who were prosperous and wealthy, and

wanted to establish a bank not only for the financial and economic benefits it would have

for the town, but also because banks were a cultural attribute common in their original

states of New York and New Hampshire. The bank directors erected the building, built

with bricks, on the south side of Main Street at the corner of Front Street.

Sequent Occupance: The Residential Areas

The first village residents, as mentioned above, were John and Loretta Graham

who moved into the upper floor of Graham’s store in 1870. The Saxtons probably lived

above their store as well. There is no way to know how many houses were built during

this era from 1870 through 1900, nor which was the first. However, by 1892 the village

boasted “of a number of fine residences and the prospects are that another year will

witness the building of a number of others.” With the opening of the brick yard, residents

had a little more choice in building materials, as evidenced by B. S. Hawes who built the

first brick house in the village in 1884.

The village grew fast enough during its first sixteen years that two additions were

added to the plat, the first known as Ewing’s Addition was platted and added to the town

in 1878. The second one is called Barnard’s addition, added in 1887, “upon which were

built an elegant brick residence and nine frame houses within the year,” followed by

several other new houses in 1888 and 1889. Two more additions were added in the late

1890s, Houk’s First Addition and Houk’s Second Addition, both of which lie between

Halliday Street and Front Street, each addition having two or three houses standing today

that were built in the 1890s. Today there are eighty-three houses in the village that were

built between 1870 and 1900, thirty of which are on the original townsite, nine on Barnard’s

addition, nine on the Houk’s additions, fifteen on Ewing’s addition, and the rest in other

parts of the village that were not yet platted at the time they were built. The houses

from the time appear to be well-built, as mentioned in the 1892

Mapleton Enterprise article and as depicted in the images below from the “Souvenir [sic]

of Good Thunder, Minnesota” published by the Good Thunder Herald at the turn of the

twentieth century. The architecture of the homes built in the period are representative of

the common American architectural styles of the era. There are no log cabins, rather

wood and brick structures using Colonial revival, Victorian, Gothic revival, Queen Anne,

and national folk house architectures. These houses represent not only the prosperity of

the developing village, but also the connections to northeastern Yankee culture,

particularly with the Victorian and national folk forms of architecture. These two forms in

particular were dependent upon the railroad to bring pre-fabricated building supplies

necessary for the architectural details.

Figure 14: Unidentified Residence, late 1800s

Center-gabled hipped-roof with full-width porch Colonial revival architecture. Also commonly known as a

“corn belt cube house.” (Photograph from Kienitz, Papers, “Souvenir [sic] of Good Thunder, Minnesota.”)

Figure 15: Unidentified Residence, late 1800s

Gable front-and-wing national folk house architecture.

(Photograph from Kienitz, Papers, “Souvenir [sic] of Good Thunder, Minnesota.”)

Figure 16: Unidentified Residence, late 1800s

Free classic, cross-gabled Queen Anne Victorian architecture.

(Photograph from Kienitz, Papers, “Souvenir [sic] of Good Thunder, Minnesota.”)

Figure 17: Unidentified Residence, late 1800s

Spindlework, cross-gabled Queen Anne Victorian architecture.

(Photograph from Kienitz, Papers, “Souvenir [sic] of Good Thunder, Minnesota.”)

Asymmetrical Gothic revival architecture.

(Photograph from Kienitz, Papers, “Souvenir [sic] of Good Thunder, Minnesota.”)

Figure 19: 210 Houk Street, 2005

Built in 1870, this is the oldest known house in Good Thunder. Note the gable front-and-wing national folk

house architecture.

Figure 18: Mc

Grew

Reside

nce

1890

Sequent Occupance: Public Space

Public buildings and structures in the first thirty years of Good Thunder’s history

served two purposes: public needs and religious life. Religious services were commonly

held at a resident’s home in the beginning until money could be raised to build a church

or meeting hall. Good Thunder did have a village hall, which the Methodists used for

services in 1878, but the location of the building is unknown. The first, probably most

important public building, however, was the post office. The importance of the post office

in the nineteenth century was twofold. First, it was the closest relationship a small town

had to the federal government, as the postmaster was a federal appointee. Second, the

post office and its postmaster held some influence in the community because they

provided a town to some degree with its identity, and more importantly because it

managed the flow and dissemination of letters and communication.

The need for the post office was such that the village and township residents

petitioned Washington for a mail route in 1871. The Postmaster General granted the

request on 6 May 1871, christening the office as Good Thunder’s Forde. John Graham

was appointed postmaster with an annual salary of twelve dollars, and mail delivery

began arriving on a semi-monthly basis on the route from Minnesota Lake to the south up

to Mankato, but would sometimes take up to six weeks because the rivers and streams

would flood, delaying the carrier. Whether the village built a post office or worked from

Graham’s home is lost to history. The village did build a post office in 1885 with stone,

brick, and plate-glass windows in the middle of the block on the north side of Main

Street, between Front and Houk Streets.

The first school house in the Good Thunder townsite was built as a two-story

24’ x 40’ wood frame building on the north-east corner of the intersection of Main and

Houk Streets. The school house, as the only public space in the early days, was often used

for religious services, particularly by the Episcopalians, Baptists, and Seventh Day

Adventists. The building was used as a school until 1892, after which William Meyer

opened a furniture store in the building and used it for his residence. The growth of the

town and the rising population of school-aged children necessitated the building of a new

school house, built at a cost of $5,000 or $8,000, depending on the sources. A newspaper

article in an 1893 issue of the Good Thunder Herald describes the new building thus:

“The village boasts of the finest public school building in the county, built and completed

in 1892 at a cost of $8000. It is solid brick, containing four rooms, all finished in modern

style and heated by a furnace…. The enrollment exceeds one hundred.”

Figure 20: Original Good Thunder Public School 1892

(Photograph from Kienitz, Papers, “Souvenir [sic] of Good Thunder, Minnesota.”)

The St. John’s Lutheran congregation also had a school, which they began around

1877 in the church building. By 1885, the congregation recognized the need to build a

building for school use. They had already made a decision to build a school when the

Seventh Day Adventists decided to sell their church and build a new one. The Lutherans

hired their first teacher in 1890 and added a second one in 1894 because of the number of

children attending the school. When St. John’s built their new church building in 1895,

they converted the old church into use for a school, and operated with two former church

buildings into the 1930s.

Figure 21: St. John's Lutheran School, ca. 1900

(Photograph from the collection of the City of Good Thunder.)

Figure 22: Original wood water tower and pump house, ca. 1898s

(Photograph from Kienitz, Papers, “Souvenir [sic] of Good Thunder, Minnesota.”)

Before the end of the century, Good Thunder also had a fairly good water works

system with a water tower and pump. The old tower stood at the north-east corner of

Sherman and Ewing Streets in block one, lot six, where the modern tower stands today.

Boardman Engineering Company of Milwaukee built the tower to hold two-thousand

barrels of water,78 approximately 63,000 gallons. Not only was the water works system an

important development for modernization of the village, but it was also essential for

another important need—fire fighting.

100

There is no information about fire fighting in Good Thunder before the fire

department was officially formed, nonetheless fire would have been an ever present

danger with all of the wood buildings and fires for heating and cooking. On 15 December

1883, the men of Good Thunder met and organized a hook and ladder company, which

has been in existence ever since. John Graham became the company foreman, J. J. F.

Graf became the assistant, and the village acquired appropriate fire fighting equipment.79

Figure 23: The first Good Thunder Fire Station , ca. 1896

(Photograph reproduced from Schrader, The Heritage of Blue Earth County, 237.)

On 30 November 1896, the hook and ladder company apparently reorganized, and Frank

H. Griffin and F. H. Morlock were respectively named to the offices of chairman and

secretary pro tem, and a station was built about that time on the north-west corner of

Front and Main Streets close to the train depot. The crew met periodically in 1897

drafting a constitution for the Good Thunder Fire Department dated 26 January 26 1898,

“for the purpose of organizing a fire department for the protection of the property of the

78 Kienitz, Papers, “Souvenir [sic] of Good Thunder, Minnesota.” 79

Hughes, History, 263.

101

village from the devastating element known as ‘fire’.”

Good Thunder was able to communicate its prosperity in trade and agriculture

during the end of the nineteenth century in aesthetic ways as well. At a meeting on 1 July

1895, when the Lutherans were building their new church, the village met and voted to

donate the money necessary to purchase and install a clock tower in the steeple of the

new church (see fig. 17). The tower was made at Mainstee, Michigan and on exhibition in

Chicago before it was shipped to Good Thunder and installed with the fifteen-hundred

pound bell from the first Lutheran church’s bell tower. The clock showed the time to the

community—an important communication device at the time because not everyone may

have had clocks or watches—and together with the bell rang out the hour.81

Sequent Occupance: The Churches

The diversity of Christian denominations in the United States during the

nineteenth century was, and still is, a rather unique quality in North America. Even in a

village as small as Good Thunder this diversity is readily apparent, as no less than eight

different denominations held services in homes and the school house in these early years.

Thereafter, five of these denominations survived and built churches and meeting halls

within Good Thunder by 1895 when the population was only a little over three hundred

people. Baptist services were the first to be held in Lyra township, beginning in 1864 at

the home of M. L. Plumb with a membership of eight people, before moving into the old

school house in the township the following year and organizing as the Maple River

Baptist Church. Catholics also met at a home for services beginning in 1874, usually at

the home of William Mountain. Other denominations made use of pubic buildings, such

102

as the Methodists who began holding services in 1878 in the village hall, and the

Lutherans, the United Brethren, and probably the Episcopalians, all of whom attended

services at the old township school house. The Seventh Day Adventists organized in the

early 1880s, but no records state where they met nor much else about them.

The Lutherans in Good Thunder were all Germans and held their services and

conducted church business in German until about 1915. Some of the original Lutheran

church members were Gottfried Schwan, Fred Bleedorn, John Sompke, John Bosin, Fred

Pautsch, Carl Matzke, Edward Malzahn, Herman Darge, and Carl Bruscke. The first

church to be built appears to have been the Lutheran church in 1876 which cost $2,000.

They also added rooms attached to the church to serve as the parsonage for an additional

$600. The centennial church history states that the first church stood until 1937 and was

used for the Lutheran parochial school building. When the congregation began to

outgrow their church, they met and voted to build a new church for a cost of $8,000 on 2

January 1895. The church members donated their work to the building project by

Figure 24: St. John’s Lutheran Church, 1876-1895

103

Central tower neoclassical architecture. Inset shows the church as a school building, 1895-1937.

(Photograph from St. John Lutheran Church, 5)

digging the basement and hauling the bricks and rock needed for the new church. In July

of 1895 while the church was being built, the village met and donated the money to

purchase a clock tower for the building. The location of the first church is not known;

however, it probably was built in the original townsite not far from where the present

church stands, as the Seventh Day Adventist church building which the Lutherans bought

to use as another school building is just a few lots west of the present building.

The congregation also used the pews and organ from the old St. John’s church in

the new building, as well as the fifteen-hundred pound bell from the old church bell

tower. Shortly after the new church was built, the congregation began to have some

104

Figure 25: St. John’s Evangelical Church, 1895

Folk style Gothic architecture.

(Photograph from Kienitz, Papers, “Souvenir [sic] of Good Thunder, Minnesota.”)

105

Central tower neoclassical architecture.

(Photograph from Kienitz, Papers, “Souvenir [sic] of Good Thunder, Minnesota.”)

problems, specifically with church doctrine, which the centennial history blames in part

on the Seventh Day Adventists.90 On 6 February 1888 Rev. J. G. Apple led the dissenting

members who split from St. John’s to form the Evangelical Lutheran Immanuel Church.

This new group of Lutherans, which included Louis Kranhold, F. C. Witting, and F.

Christian Blume, held their German-language services in private homes until they were

able to build a new frame church in Barnard’s Addition in 1890.

Figure 26: Im

manuel

Luthe

an Church,

1890

106

The first Episcopal services were held in 1872 in the log school house in Good

Thunder. The Episcopalians began building their chapel in 1895 at about the same time

the Lutherans were building their new St. John’s church in the Barnard’s Addition on the

west side of lot one, block one. They named their St. Luke’s Episcopal Chapel on 10 May

1895. The building cost $1,000 and had a membership of thirty people, among them

Mr. and Mrs. B. F. Welch and Mr. and Mrs. John G. Graham.93

Figure 27: St. Luke's Episcopal Chapel ca. 1915, erected 1895

Traditional foursquare New England style meeting house architecture.94

(Photograph from the collection of the Minnesota Historical Society)

107

Figure 28: Interior of St. Luke’s Episcopal Chapel, ca. 1898

(Photograph from the collection of the Minnesota Historical Society)

Area Catholics did not have services until 1868 when the first mass was

celebrated at home of Henry Weir. Two other homes served as places for mass until St.

Joseph’s Catholic Church of Good Thunder in the New England Gothic style was built in

1879 and completed in 1880. Bishop John Ireland came to Good Thunder on 11 October

1881 to bless the church and administer the sacrament of confirmation.”

During the tenure of Fr. Edmund Stack, 1891-1910, the church was redecorated

and stained glass windows were installed.96 In other areas of Minnesota, particularly St.

Paul, German and Irish Roman Catholics established their own parishes; however, Good

Thunder was different because of the smaller Catholic population. Rather than separate

108

Figure 29: St. Joseph's Catholic Church, ca. 1890

(Photograph from Kienitz, Papers, “Souvenir [sic] of Good Thunder, Minnesota.”)

parishes for different ethnicities, the congregation consisted of a mix of German

Catholics, such as Schultz, Hollerich, Wandersee, Kruger, Polchow, and Irish Catholics

like Henry Weir, Andrew McCarthy, and William Mountain.

109

Figure 30: Seventh Day Adventist Church, erected 1883

Central tower neoclassical architecture. Photograph is of the building when it was the Lutheran School.

(Photograph from Kienitz, Papers, “Souvenir [sic] of Good Thunder, Minnesota.”)

The Seventh Day Adventist congregation built their first chapel in 1883, which

they quickly outgrew, necessitating the building of a new chapel completed in 1886. The

original church stood on lots five and six in block nine of the original townsite and was

sold to St. John’s Lutheran, who used it as a school building. Their new, larger church

also stood in the same block on lots seven and eight. Interestingly, there is no known

110

photograph of the second church; however, there is a photograph of the first church when

it was the Lutheran school.

Although the Baptists were the first to hold services, they were the last

denomination to build in the village. The Maple River Baptist congregation built their

wood-frame church in 1886 on Main Street at the south-east corner of Houk Street on lot

nine of block five, directly across the street from the school house in which they held

their first services. The Baptist congregation probably had the most eclectic membership

of any of the churches, except perhaps the Seventh Day Adventists, with a mix of old

stock Americans, particularly those from Pennsylvania and Ohio, as well as some of the

Germans. Notable Baptist members were Marion Hills, Henry Dyer, Charles Hawes,

Thomas Garvin, Oscar Cassidy and Gustavus Meilicke.

Central tower neoclassical architecture.

(Photograph from Kienitz, Papers, “Souvenir [sic] of Good Thunder, Minnesota.”)

Conclusion

Good Thunder’s first thirty years were marked by a remarkable, orderly

development of agricultural, economic, and social landscape evolution. The proximity to

Map

Bapt

111

Mankato, which had already been established and growing since 1852, coupled with the

services of the railroad provided Good Thunder with a larger city and gateway to the

wider world and access to wholesale goods needed for the construction of buildings and

the sale of agricultural harvests. The form of civil government for Good Thunder during

this time is unknown. There are no village meeting minutes extant, nor any mention of

laws or mayors until 1910.

This era of development demonstrates the idea of the United States as a melting

pot, as the Good Thunder villages built their community without any apparent segregation

of the various ethnicities except in the case of church congregations. The mix of old stock

Americans who probably arrived with a good educational background, some degree of

wealth, and connections to the eastern United States provided a leadership and guiding

hand in the establishment of business growth and development, and village planning. The

arrival of German and Irish immigrants who brought trade skills and farming techniques

provided the knowledge and work base necessary for the community to exploit the

landscape for agricultural purposes, and provide the services necessary for building the

structures required to support that endeavour.

The economic landscape is replete with first, second, and third order

hierarchies.101 The various homes built in the village and the four expansions to the plat

show the growth of the first order economic hierarchy, supplying the base for trade,

which is the needs of the residents themselves. The relatively rapid development of the

businesses, such as the drug, general, grocery, and hardware stores created a sound base

for the second order retailers. Finally, the third order of the hierarchy manifests in the

112

grain elevators and the grain agents buying, selling, and transporting the fruits of Good

Thunder’s labor in the wholesale market.

Good Thunder served as the central hub for both village and township residents.

Without it, the farmers would have had more difficulty obtaining goods and services and

would have had to expend more money and resources to move their harvested crops off

the farm by draft teams to Mankato for sale and trade.

The village also provided important social space. Without the community, the

village and township residents may never have developed the Grange and the Farmers’

Alliance which were important, influential developments in the state’s political landscape.

The saloons, grain elevators, train depot, post office, newspaper, and general stores

provided many different venues for meeting other residents, and communicating news

and information. Furthermore, the village provided a central area for the practice of and

participation in the various religious denominations prevalent in the township. It was the

blending of all of these cultural, economic, social, public, and physical landscapes in a

highly functional and prosperous fashion which directed Good Thunder’s entrance into

the twentieth century and shaped its development in the new modern era.

101 Brown, 294.

“The created landscapes of man are much like any other product of human creativity.

They have much in common with the manifold forms of human art and artifice. . . . They

are constrained by need and context, but they are also expressions of authorship.”

~Marwyn S. Samuels

113

Chapter 7

Good Thunder in the Modern Age, 1900-1950

Cultural Landscape

The dawn of the twentieth century marked an end to the pioneering expansion of

the upper Midwest. The population base in Blue Earth County stabilized, the farm land

was for the most part fully occupied, and the new immigrants to the United States tended

to settle in the large metropolitan areas where factory jobs were easy to obtain and thus

were not inclined to settle in small rural towns where jobs and available farm land were

scarce. Good Thunder had established itself by this time as a small but strong economic

force and a relatively independent, self-sufficient community for Lyra township and Blue

Earth County, which a reporter from Mapleton described as a “wide-a-wake little berg.”

During his visit, the reporter noted that the Christmas holiday shopping was just getting

started, but still a bit slow. He also remarked on the fine water system in the village and

praised the residential areas, but criticized that fact that the town did not yet have any

electric lighting and still had old, wooden sidewalks.

114

Figure 32: Bird's Eye (East), Good Thunder, Minnesota, ca. 1909 (Photograph

from the collection of the Minnesota Historical Society)

The leadership of the business community positioned Good Thunder in an

economic niche that fostered small business and supported all of the primary needs of the

villagers as well as the farmers in the greater agricultural community. This niche,

however, was not necessarily suited for adaptability to the coming social and economic

changes about to take place in the United States and the world at large. Good Thunder

had already reached its peak population of 505 in 1900, and suffered a slow decline over

the next fifty years as World Wars I and II, the Great Depression, the introduction of the

automobile and its infrastructure of roads, the decline of rail traffic, the rapid

development of technology, the introduction of mechanized farming techniques, and the

change from an agricultural to factory-based economy in the United States occurred

around the village. These influences contributed to cultural substitution and a change in

115

the character of Good Thunder, as the descendents of the educated and business-oriented

old stock Americans left for jobs in urban areas of Minnesota like Mankato and the Twin

Cities, leaving the Irish and German descendents who farmed the land and provided

skilled labor services.

View to the north and west.

(Photograph from the collection of the City of Good Thunder.)

During the early 1900s Good Thunder boasted a long list of businesses and services.

These services included the train depot with passenger rail service, an express office, a

public and parochial school, six churches, a telephone system, a flour mill, a lumber yard;

two each of harness shops, millinery stores, barbers, fruit and confection stores, hardware

stores, grain elevators, and hose companies; a drug store, a meat market,

a photography studio, a book store, a livery stable, a doctor and a dentist, a jeweler, a

cigar factory, a brickyard, a shoe store, a tailor, a newspaper published weekly, a wagon

Figure 33: Main

Stree

. 1900

116

shop, a brass band, and a good water works system. Even with all of these services for

residents, businesses began to feel the effects of a more mobile society by 1910. Mail

order catalogs, the passenger rail, and later the automobile allowed residents to shop

easily in Mankato or have goods delivered to their doorstep. In 1911 the Herald began

running advertisements to “Keep the Bacon at home” and merchants made periodic pleas

to residents to shop at home. Such advertisements became a standard part of most

Herald issues during the next seventy years.

With the physical structures of Good Thunder’s landscape already well developed

by 1900, its real character and personality began to take shape in the social and cultural

landscape through a variety of organizations which organized during its modern era. The

first to form was a village government, followed shortly by a businessmen’s association.

Later in the modern era, the Good Thunder Mother’s Club organized and had a strong

influence on the lives and activities of the village children, and the Maple River Study

Club formed, hosting lectures on various topics, such as the town’s history.

Civil government in Good Thunder was likely governed by the township officers

who first organized by permission of the Blue Earth County Commissioners in September

1866.8 It was not until 1910 that Good Thunder had its own government separate from the

township or the county, which took the form of a village council of three elected

councilmen and a president elected for a one year term between 1910 and 1938, after

which the term was changed to two years until 1959. Good Thunder’s other connection to

government was, of course, the post office.

Frank Griffin, the Good Thunder Postmaster, died suddenly in 1933, which caused

some confusion in the appointment of the new postmaster and illustrates the importance

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of the post office to the village residents and the lack thereof in Washington. Carl Young

had purchased the Herald from Frank Griffin when Griffin became the postmaster. When

Griffin died, his widow was appointed acting postmaster and Young actively campaigned

for the office, writing to Representative Ryan Elmer, a Democrat, and submitted to

Representative Elmer letters of support, chiefly from Nicholas Juliar, a lawyer in

Mankato. Young stated that he was a Democrat and the Herald had always been a strong

Democratic paper. Representative Elmer submitted Young’s name to the Postmaster

General as the top choice, and Young received the position.

Upon hearing the news of the appointment, the residents of Good Thunder began

to flood Elmer’s office with letters, calling the appointment a “bombshell” and protesting

the appointment of an “outstanding Republican.” Elmer wrote back to all of the protest

letters, stating that he had several letters of support stating Young was a Democrat, and he

wrote to Juliar dismissing the protest letters as unimportant, and asked for Juliar’s help in

appeasing those writers who worked on the Democratic campaigns. The Good Thunder

residents were obviously very much aligned with the Democratic party, no doubt a

continuation of the village’s association with the Grange, the Farmer’s Alliance, and the

Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. While it had no real power, the post office and the office

of postmaster had a symbolic power for the village, representing its character and

connection to the federal government.

Whereas the office of postmaster was symbolic and the village council made

ordinances and had oversight of village funds, the real leadership of the community came

from the Good Thunder Improvement Club, a business association that formed on 12

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March 1912. The businessmen who met that day elected Frank Griffin, editor of the Good

Thunder Herald, as chairman of the club. The club also wrote a constitution which, in

article one states: “The object of the club is to secure united action of the people of Good

Thunder and vicinity in advancing their commercial and general interests.”

The first years of the Good Thunder Improvement Club’s meetings often centered

on discussions and calls for action regarding the safety of thoroughfares over railroad

crossings,11 funds for road improvements and grading of the roads leading into town,

especially the road to the creamery, sewer improvements and garbage collection, another

hotel for the village, and the posting of directional signs to Good Thunder on the

highways.

The Improvement Club also organized and fostered events in the social landscape

for Good Thunder. In 1916 the club decided to recommend a Fourth of July celebration,

recalling the Fourth of July in 1887 when the village hosted Andrew Good Thunder and

rededicating the name of the village as Good Thunder. The Fourth of July celebration

became an annual event during this era, with parades and other activities. On occasion the

celebration included a visit from Charles Good Thunder, son of Andrew Good Thunder,

who maintained a friendship and relationship with the village, even donating a peace pipe

carved by Andrew Good Thunder to the village in 1947, where it was placed on display

for all the residents at the bank. The club also recommended and started a baseball team

for the town in 1916,19 which was very popular and continued for many years in the

village, began setting up and maintaining an ice rink near the bandstand on Main Street,

and began sponsoring motion pictures on Saturday evenings, the first of which was held

in January 1949 and was well received by the residents.

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Figure 34: Good Thunder baseball club, ca. 1920

(Photograph reproduced from Schrader, The Heritage of Blue Earth County, 239.)

Not all of the club’s endeavors were entirely successful, however. Their efforts to

convince the village council to upgrade the sewer were “deemed hopeless.” However, the

“business section of the village had gone ahead on a development project for a private

sewer, that could be extended into a public sewer if needed.” They investigated having a

public library in the village in 1919, although it never materialized, and in 1921 held a

contest to create a slogan for Good Thunder. No slogan was ever chosen, however,

because the club apparently did not meet frequently thereafter for some years. By 1930

the group began referring to itself as the “Booster Club,”25 and business of the meetings

often revolved more on promotion of Good Thunder and event planning, such as dinners,

picnics, and ice cream socials.

World events such as the Great Depression and the World Wars did have some

noticeable effects on Good Thunder. The Great Depression apparently did not have as

many devastating effects in Blue Earth County as it did in other areas of the country. In

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Good Thunder, the businesses on Main Street remained intact, perhaps owing to the

agricultural basis for the village’s economic resource base. However, evidence suggests

Good Thunder had its share of problems associated with the Great Depression, such as

vagrants and unemployed people. For example, at a 1931 Booster Club meeting, members

called for a motion to appoint a committee to “take up the matter of cleaning up the town

of unwanted citizens.”28 Wars also affected Good Thunder, just as they did other towns

and cities across the country. Good Thunder likely sent some of its sons to World War I,

but the village does not have a memorial for them. However, there is a marker now on

Main Street in the small park, where the American Legion Post erected a memorial for the

174 Good Thunder men who died in World War II.

Figure 35: W

rld

r II Mem

rial

(

aph

tho

)

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It was not only world events that touched Good Thunder’s landscape.

Technological, economic, and agricultural changes affected farming in the area in various

ways. Farmers phased out buckwheat in the early part of the century, and began to grow

less wheat as technological advances in farm machinery and genetic modification made

corn a better cash crop for the region (see Table 1). Hog farming increased gradually

during this era, perhaps due to new techniques in housing larger numbers of animals in

smaller spaces. Although the creamery continued to operate and was mentioned a few

times a year in the Herald, milk production during the modern era began to fall off, which

28 “Proceedings,” 14 September 1931.

provided fewer raw resources for the creamery operation (see Table 2).

Good Thunder had been established long enough by the 1930s that the new

leaders and the population as a whole were a generation or two removed from the

pioneering days. The community began to evidence a need for identity and to create a

sense of history to delineate their own unique community culture. The Booster Club

began this process through narrative when the members formed a historical committee

which began to research and relay historical information about the village back to its

members. The first evidence of this is the 13 April 1936 meeting when C. F. Bauer

reported his investigations regarding the founding of the town and the ownership of the

township plats from upon which Good Thunder was built. Bauer visited the Registrar of

Deeds in Mankato and found that a part of Lyra township section nine “was conveyed by

U.S. patent to Geo. W. Ewing on Jan. 8, 1864.” This fact established for the club the

earliest date that land now in the incorporated limits of Good Thunder was purchased

from the government and settled by pioneers.

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Another example of narrative communication was a talk given by W. J. Lieb, a

railroad man from the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railroad company. Lieb

provided the Booster Club with more historical information about the township,

beginning with Pierre Charles Le Sueur’s exploration of the county and the claim staked

by Noble G. Root in 1854. Some of Lieb’s information was erroneous, however, because

Noble Root was never “massacred by Indians” during his brief stay on the claim.

Nevertheless, Lieb regaled the crowd with pitches for the railroad, discussing how the

railroads allowed the pioneers to make agriculture profitable and continued to be an

active agent in keeping the small town alive. Lieb was able to use the oral narrative to

synthesize local history, promote the railroad, and present it in a context of significance

for Good Thunder’s businessmen.

Transportation

The importance of the railroad was still significant in Good Thunder’s modern

era. It provided a few jobs, transported goods and grains to and from Good Thunder, and

served the population with passenger service to and from Mankato, which also carried the

mail to town. Josephine Barnard, who worked at the depot in 1918-1919, recalled that

trains came four times a day, and passengers could take the 9 AM passenger car to

Mankato and return at 4 PM. As automobiles and highway construction developed and

offered new modes of transportation, the passenger service on the branch lines of the

railroad declined proportionally. The signs of the automobile take-over became evident in

1932 when the Milwaukee decided to remove its passenger line on the Good Thunder

route. This caused a stir among the members of the Booster Club not because it would

remove passenger service to Mankato where people could shop outside of Good

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Thunder—something that the business men had been discouraging for many years—

rather, this train carried the daily mail. Booster Club members contacted other nearby

cities on the route, such as Rapidan, Mapleton, and Minnesota Lake, coordinated their

efforts, and seem to have convinced the Milwaukee to retain daily passenger and freight

Map 9: Lyra Township 1929

Notice the heavy dashed lines indicating unpaved roads.

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(Map from Atlas and farmers' directory of Blue Earth County, Minnesota (St. Paul: Webb Publishing, 1929),

31.)

service. By the end of the modern era, the railroad only offered passenger service in Good

Thunder at 1 PM and 7 PM. The fact that automobiles took over this public transportation

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service of the railroad is evident in Josephine Barnard’s recollection that the passenger

car often had only her and Mrs. John McCarty on the train.

Other than the railroad, it was road improvement and construction that often

occupied the Booster Club transportation discussions throughout Good Thunder’s modern

era. The earliest action was the appointment of a committee to actively solicit donations

from the village and township residents for a general road fund, from which the club was

able to donate some one-hundred dollars to have the creamery road leading east out of

Good Thunder graded up to the bridge over the Maple River.

The roads leading out of Good Thunder were unpaved in the 1930s, and remained that

way until the 1950s, resulting in a long battle for road improvements. The Booster Club

began road discussions in earnest in 1936, seeking to provide Good Thunder with better

access to the rest of the county and Mankato. The club began circulating petitions that

garnered practically unanimous support and sought the backing of the Mankato Chamber

of Commerce, who assured the club of their “earnest enthusiastic support.” The club’s

road committee met with the county commissioners who told them that the road

development program for the year was already set, but that they would consider making

Good Thunder’s request a priority for the next year, offering to upgrade Good Thunder

road number one so it could be paved in the future. Results on the road improvement

were slow, although the county surveyor drafted a bill that would designate road number

one as a federal and state contribution road and the committee caught the ear of state

Senator Val Imm, who also worked to get a bill for funding the road improvement

throughout the coming two decades. The bill was apparently passed and monies

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appropriated, but there are no records in the village minutes or the Booster Club

proceedings which discuss the matter.

Figure 36: Main Street with Automobiles ca. 1930

(Photograph from FamilyOldPhotos.com, accessed 3 October 2005)

The next step was to have the road to Mankato paved, which the Booster Club

began working on in 1948, coordinating with Rapidan and rallying “a delegation of forty

or more determined citizens, both business men and farmers from Good Thunder

and Rapidan [who] called on the county commissioners on Tuesday to find out

more about roads.

“Both villages have been without adequate roadways for a decade and have finally

reached the point where they want more than promises and have indicated that they

intend to keep at it until they are successful. . . .

“Your reporter, who attended the meeting, formed the opinion that the

commissioners would have been happier had the delegates remained at home. . . .

It was pointed out by the commissioners through Mr. Minks, chairman, that work

had started on No. 1 but the group always came back with the statement that after

that was done, it still lead nowhere, and the natives of these parts want a road that

leads some place.”

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The frustrations of Good Thunder residents were not appeased, however, for quite some

time. The Herald reported again two weeks later that the highway meeting was

disappointing because the commissioners and county engineer had nothing to suggest and

that “very little action was contemplated on their part.” Nevertheless, the voices of Good

Thunder and actions of Senator Imm must have made an impression on the

commissioners because a July Herald article announced that Good Thunder would have a

paved road to Mankato completed by 1950. 42 This, however, was delayed, and Good

Thunder did not see a paved route for a few more years.

Sequent Occupance: The Business District

Good Thunder’s business district had been built almost to capacity by 1900. Very

little in the way of new construction occurred during the next fifty years. A few

businesses closed, some were bought and sold, others added new goods and services to

compete with other stores, and a few new businesses opened up, usually relating to

changes in the cultural landscape such as mechanized farm machinery and automobile

services, such as a dealership, repair services, and filling stations. A few buildings

changed roles from public to business space, such as the old school house in which

William Meyer opened a furniture store. He continued selling furniture there through the

early 1930s, and, for a brief time anyway, the store also served as a funeral home with

Meyer as the undertaker.

The mills in the area did not fare so well in the modern era, and the lack of news

items about them indicates that they may have all disappeared early in the century. The

Cable Mill burned to the ground in 1905 when it was struck by lightning. R. L. Houk and

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Walter Redfern built a new, steam-powered grist mill later that year, also known as the

Cable Mill, which likewise was destroyed by fire about 1909. The lack of evidence

showing any replacements for the mills may be due to the fact that it was just as easy to

ship grain out by train for milling in Mankato or other places.

Carl Sohre opened a hardware store on the south side of Main Street next to A. S.

Handy’s smithy in the 1880s, which Carl Bruscke bought in 1897 and operated in

partnership with Sohre until Sohre’s death in 1928. In 1905 Bruscke bought the smithy

from Handy to use for storage for the hardware store. Bruscke’s store was also the John

Deere™ dealership until 1928 when the John Deere company wanted dealers to increase

their inventory. Bruscke, however, opted out of the dealership status for the store, in part

because of the Depression but also because of a desire not to have inventory he probably

could not sell. Bruscke kept the business going successfully through the Great

Depression, bringing his two sons into partnership and adding a new store front in 1933.

Carl Sohre also had a general store in Good Thunder, established in 1882, which

he sold prior to moving to Virginia, Minnesota, for a short time. Sohre returned to Good

Thunder in 1907 and opened a new general store, which his sons Arthur and Carl took

over in 1913. Sohre’s slogan was “Give a little treat each time you make a sale to keep the

customers friends,” which Sohre usually provided as cheese and crackers, sliced sausage

and cold soft drinks, a tradition which continued throughout the existence of the store. By

1925 the Sohres had added hardware and farm machinery to their general merchandise

lines, and in 1937 they began selling groceries. Other general merchandise stores in

existence were the Ulrichs Bros. General Store, and Griffin’s Stationary, Lamps,

Crockery & Musical Instruments. Shoe and boot stores died out by 1900, but

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Wiedenheft’s Shoes did not disappear. Henry Wiedenheft’s sons Gustave and Otto took

over their father’s shoe and boot store in 1908 as Wiedenheft Bros. They expanded the

business to include general merchandise, such as clothing and groceries. Their business

did so well, that in 1923 Wiedenheft Bros. required a new building.

Anson Handy built a new smithy around 1905 just south of the Maple River

Baptist Church. On 16 November 1916 G. A. Graf began working for Handy as a

blacksmith and took over the business at some unknown time later. Graf closed the

smithy on 1 June 1924, moving it to a shop on his property by his home which he had

purchased a few years prior, reopening on 1 July 1924. Graf had also established a feed

grinding business in the early 1900s, which he discontinued a few years later when the R.

L. Houk feed mill opened.

In 1924 the Graham House hotel, an icon of the town, burned down in April50 and

was never rebuilt or replaced with another hotel. The Gnadke’s erected a building on the

northeast corner of Main Street and highway number one, just across from the creamery.

This business was an early service garage and dealership in Good Thunder for threshing

machines and tractors. The Gnadkes also housed, sold, and delivered bulk oil and fuel

from the building during that time. The business was closed because of the Great

Depression in 1932, but the building was later renovated and reopened as a restaurant

with a dance floor in the back. It was a popular social gathering spot in the late 1930s and

early 1940s. However, business slowed during World War II and the Gnadkes closed the

restaurant in 1946.

During the 1940s Good Thunder gained a bakery owned by Ted Kliest in between

Marlow’s Fairway Foods and Segar’s soda fountain shop on the west end of Main Street

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near where the Graham House stood. Dick Strenge of Mountain Lake bought the Home

Bakery from Kliest in 1946. In 1948 Strenge purchased Carl Segar’s soda fountain in the

building next door, incorporating the soda fountain into the bakery.

Good Thunder business developments between 1910 and 1920 illustrate

adaptations to the cultural changes in nation, even though Good Thunder had reached its

lowest population level in its history by 1920. The Polk’s directory lists J. A. Tyholm &

Co. as a Ford dealership, the Darge Garage opened as an automobile repair and service

shop, Standard Oil Company had a filling station in town, the Good Thunder Electric

Company was going strong, and the Good Thunder-Mapleton Telephone Company

provided telephone service for the town. Business growth declined somewhat in the

1930s and 1940s dues to the Depression and World War II. The Good Thunder Herald

suspended publication between January 1943 and August 1946. Business seemed to pick

up after the war, however, as the 2 January 1947 issue of the Herald provided a look back

at 1946, noting that the First National Bank surpassed the one million dollar mark in

assets, five new businesses started that year, and a new doctor began his practice in Good

Thunder as well. These were all good prospects for a continued future for Good

Thunder at the close of its modern era.

Sequent Occupance: The Residential Areas

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the residential area of Good Thunder

was well built and nicely kept. The Mapleton reporter who visited the village in

December of 1901 had the following to say: “A drive through the resident portion of

Good Thunder impressed us greatly. Now we do not mean to flatter the town, for

vanity might prove its ruin, but we could not help but think of the beautiful

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residence location of Fairmont as we passed on. The natural advantages of timber

slopes compare with Fairmont nicely. Many of the residences command one, two,

and upwards of three acres, making handsome places. A few years hence we

predict for Good Thunder several of the finest resident streets in the county.”

However, another report in the Mapleton newspaper remarked that “Unless some building

is done here in the near future our town must remain at a standstill, as at present there is

not a vacant house or room that can be secured under any conditions.”

Figure 37: Ewing's Addition Bird's-Eye-View, ca. 1900 View

to the north. St. Joseph’s Catholic Church on the left.

(Photograph from the collection of the Minnesota Historical Society)

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Figure 38: Carl C. Bruscke Residence, ca. 1910 Gable-front-and-wing

national folk house architecture.

(Photograph from the collection of the Minnesota Historical Society)

Figure 39: F. H. Morlock Residence, ca. 1910

Cross-gabled Queen Anne Victorian architecture.

(Photograph from the collection of the Minnesota Historical Society)

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Figure 40: Schlesselman Residence, ca. 1900

Center-gabled hipped-roof Colonial revival architecture.

(Photograph from Kienitz, Papers, “Souvenir [sic] of Good Thunder, Minnesota.”)

There is little recorded evidence for the building of residences during the first half

of the twentieth century. The Blue Earth County Assessor Office database shows

fiftyseven existing homes were built during this era. The majority of the houses from this

era were built between 1907 and 1926, three built in the 1930s and ten houses in the

1940s. The earlier houses were built with national folk house, Victorian, and Colonial

revival architectural styles. The homes built in the 1940s were built with the minimal

modern architectural style. In all probability the effects of the population decline in the

1910s, the Great Depression, and the World Wars contributed to the apparent stagnation

in the development of Good Thunder’s residential areas. The only addition to the village

plat was the Graham’s Addition which was a mere two-and-one-half blocks between

Chapel and Sherman Streets on the western edge of the incorporated area.

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The only two residents of any significance to this era involved St. John’s Lutheran

Church. In 1917 the congregation built a new parsonage across the street from the church

in the common vernacular form of the Prairie School style of American architecture. The

parsonage was remodeled in 1931, and some of the old barns on the lot were removed

when the congregation made improvements to the church. The congregation also built a

new school building in 1937 and thus no longer needed the old church buildings they

were using. The old Seventh Day Adventist Church was sold, renovated and became the

home of Kenneth Elliot during this era.

Figure 41: St. John's Lutheran Parsonage, 1917

(Photograph reproduced from St. John Lutheran Church, 13.)

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Figure 43: 631 Sherman Street, built in 1945 Minimal

traditional architecture.

(Photograph from the Blue Earth County Assessor Office [online database])

Figure 42: Former

venth

Day Adventist

Church

(

aph

tho

)

136

Figure 44: 621 Sherman Street, built in 1948 Minimal

traditional architecture.

(Photograph from the Blue Earth County Assessor Office [online database])

Sequent Occupance: Public Space

Good Thunder’s modern era also saw very little in the way of new buildings for

the village government. A brief article in a 1902 Mapleton newspaper issue remarked that

the “city hall is undergoing necessary repairs for the accommodation of the fire

apparatus,” suggesting that the village president and council shared the space with the fire

department (see fig. 23). Another brief article noted that the repairs were completed by

March of the same year and that the council was pleased with the accommodations. The

needs of the council and the fire department soon outgrew this old space. In 1930, the

First National Bank was looking to sell the building next to it. At an October meeting, the

council approved borrowing $4,000 to buy the building and use it to house a public

restroom, the municipal liquor store, and eventually the fire station.

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Figure 45: Main Street, ca. 1910

View to the south and east. Far left is Bruscke’s hardware, Wiedenheft’s in the center, an unknown building,

and restaurant in the bank building. The unknown building would later be the fire station and village hall.

(Photograph from the collection of the Blue Earth County Historical Society)

The post office also outgrew its space and moved into the old school house that

was formerly William Meyer’s furniture store and funeral parlor in 1938. In 1923 Good

Thunder built an addition to the school and created its first high school, which included a

gymnasium. The St. John’s Lutheran congregation built their new school building in 1937

in the lot east of the church.

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Note the Public School to the left with the steeple.

(Photograph from the collection of the Minnesota Historical Society)

Figure 47: St. John's Lutheran School, built in 1937

(Photograph reproduced from St. John’s Lutheran Church, 18.)

Most of the development in Good Thunder’s public sphere was directed toward

upgrading utilities and services. The village council moved to condemn the wooden

Figure

46:

Good Th

under

gh Sc

hool

139

sidewalks in part of the original townsite and Barnard’s Addition in 1910, and built new

cement sidewalks six feet wide. Most of the rest of the original townsite sidewalks were

repaired or remade when the council made another resolution in 1936. The Good Thunder

Improvement Club petitioned the village council to investigate better sewers and garbage

collection in 1913. The council responded to the club’s petition in May that no work

could be done with the sewers at the present time, so the businesses upgraded their own

sewers with plans for extension into a public sewer for the future. Some work on the

water system in 1914 resulted from Frank Griffin’s petition to the village council for

reimbursement on repairs he had done on the village’s water main. The council readily

agreed to the reimbursement and resolved to extend the water main system.

Good Thunder had enjoyed the benefits of electricity, probably since the late

1890s, since photographs from the early 1900s show electric poles and lines on Main

Street. In 1914 the village considered bids for franchising electric lights and their poles

Figure 48: South Side of Main Street at Front Street, ca. 1900 Note the

electric poles left of center and on the corner in front of the bank entrance. (Photograph

reproduced from Schrader, The Heritage of Blue Earth County, 233.)

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and wires, which it awarded to the local Good Thunder Electric Light Company. The

village contracted with the company for five years, agreeing to pay $41.40 per month in

exchange for twenty-two 60 Watt lights. Twenty of the lights ran from dusk until 11:30

PM, and the other two lights ran until dawn. The Good Thunder Electric Light Company

lost their contract to the larger Northern States Power in 1927, because it was able to offer

a much lower bid.

The new lights added an element of modernism to the otherwise nineteenth

century façade of Good Thunder’s Main Street. There was an opera house in the early

1900s, location of which is unknown, providing a stage for plays and other cultural

events for the residents. Also, the Improvement Club made an attempt to have a public

library for the village, but there is no other information as to their success in that venture,

and it presumably went unrealized.

One aspect that was never included in the plat of the original townsite was open

public space for outdoor events. The bandstand was, therefore, located in an empty lot in

between Wiedenheft Bros. general store and Bruscke & Son Hardware, probably on lots

three and four, block four on the south side of Main Street. The lot also served as a

skating rink which the Booster Club installed in November of 1930. The Booster Club

also purchased a 140’ x 274’ lot of land in Graham’s Addition for $91 for use as a

playground, which the club presented to the school. The club also moved to acquire

additional land nearby which could be used for a baseball field.77 The club was

successful, because the 1938 air photo (Map 10) of Good Thunder shows a ball field just

west of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church.

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Map 10: Good Thunder Air Photo 1938

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(Air photo BIP-3-38 from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Soil Conservation Service air photos of Blue

Earth County.)

Sequent Occupance: The Churches

Only four of the church congregations in Good Thunder survived the modern era,

illustrating changes in the village’s population and cultural composition. These changes

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support the theory of cultural substitution of Catholics and Lutherans becoming the

dominant culture in the village. The Seventh Day Adventist Church’s last known minister

was Elder C. Wiest, who ministered from 1933 to 1935. The last time the church was

listed in the city directory was 1945, suggesting the congregation disbanded shortly after

that time. St. Luke’s Episcopal Church also disbanded in October of 1946 because the

deaths of its members and removals to other towns made it impractical to hold services

Figure 49: Community Baptist Church, ca. 1952

(Photograph from the collection of the Minnesota Historical Society)

with such a small congregation. Therefore the diocese sold the church to the Community

Baptist Church, which had apparently supplanted the Maple River Baptist Church, whose

building was torn down some years prior.81

The congregation of the Immanuel Lutheran Church obviously changed more

easily with the times and had a need to service non-German speaking members, because

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they added English services beginning in 1920. The congregation also remodeled and

enlarged their building in 1925. St. John’s Lutheran Church also remodeled their church

building, adding a basement and new organ, and removing the old barns and buildings to

the rear of the church and on the parsonage lot in 1931. In 1934 the church interior was

remodeled and redecorated, a second entrance was built on the south side of the building,

and new art-glass windows were installed. A smithy stood on the lot just north of the

church, which the congregation purchased in 1934, tearing the smithy and the

blacksmith’s house down to make room for a playground and skating rink area for the

school children. Unlike the Immanuel Lutheran Church, St. John’s continued to hold its

services and conduct its business entirely in German, and only added English services in

addition to German in October of 1940.

St. Joseph’s Catholic Church also saw a few changes as its congregation became

smaller. Since 1884, The church had always been administered by the Mapleton parish,

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Figure 50: St. Joseph's Catholic Church, ca. 1950

(Photograph from the collection of the Minnesota Historical Society)

but was transferred to St. John’s Parish in Mankato in 1948, when it became a mission

church. The building was also “extensively redecorated and the sanctuary remodeled.”

Conclusion

Good Thunder entered the modern era of the twentieth century as a

wellestablished and prosperous agricultural support community. The passion for

managing the community’s social and economic health and survival remained strong and

intact throughout the era, primarily supported by the Booster Club. This passion

facilitated the solidification of the community into a distinct personality, giving rise to

subtle traditions peculiar to Good Thunder and passed on in oral forms of

communication. Good Thunder retained its nineteenth century natural resource

perceptions of an agricultural resource base, and were able to adapt and work for changes

that would continue to support that base.

The effects of automobiles and technology, the Great Depression and the World

Wars caused problems and changes that the people addressed in ways which continued

their existence as much as possible in the context of their halcyon days of yore. The

modern era saw the continuation of first order residential establishments, albeit with a

diminishing population. Nevertheless, the second order business establishments

continued to operate and serve the residential establishment, while under the threat of

replacement from accessible retailers in Mankato and mail order catalogs. However, the

third order wholesaling establishments appear to be almost entirely absent by the end of

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the modern era, as corporate conglomeration and large urban areas took over all of those

roles.

At the end of the modern era, the sons of Good Thunder returned home from

World War II, breathing a bit of new life into the community as they sought to build a life

interrupted by the war, starting new businesses or taking the reigns in existing business

from the elder generation. The community probably felt safe and confident in its role in

the greater society, having maintained its current existence through an otherwise

tumultuous world rapidly changing around them. However, it would be this confidence

and belief in life remaining the same that would set up Good Thunder as a dying

community over the next quarter century.

“The small rural community was extremely vulnerable to the social and economic

consequences of resource exploitation and in reality was destined to become a casualty of

the very forces that created it.”

~Harland Padfield

Chapter 8

The Dying Community, 1950-1975

Cultural Landscape

Good Thunder awoke from its modern era in a dawn of seeming prosperity. The

Great Depression was long past, the surviving soldiers in World War II had returned

home, and the community took up its life with an intention of continuing the traditions of

the past in harmony with the twentieth century social changes they had experienced. The

streets of the village were recently paved, the clock tower still chimed, and residents still

shopped at the general stores and grocery markets on Main Street. Little did they realize

147

that the economic forces of the modern society would bring about the death of their

community as an independent, self-sufficient commerce center.2

Evidence of Good Thunder’s decay can be seen in the stores which specialized

their merchandise, or simply closed because the owners retired. Some businesses were

taken over by the children of the owners or sold to unrelated people. However, the GI Bill

(which provided veterans with an opportunity for education), the Baby Boom and need

for young families to provide for their children, and the general job market was such that

many of the younger generation moved to urban areas to attend university or trade

schools where they commonly remained after graduation, or to find jobs in the retail,

business, and industrial sectors that were located in the cities. This is not to say that there

was a mass exodus from Good Thunder. Indeed, the population in Good Thunder

remained quite stable in the period between 1950 and 1975. There were still other

Figure 51: Main Street, ca. 1952

View to the north and east. The white building with peaked façade is the Home Bakery. Petrowske

Implements to the right, Marlow’s Fairway Grocery and Segar Drugs to the left. (Photograph from the

collection of the Minnesota Historical Society)

148

opportunities for employment nearby, such as canning factories and hog farms, allowing

longtime residents or those who did not want to leave with jobs, even as the growth of

malls, shopping centers, and big box stores in Mankato contributed to Main Street drying

up. The people did not abandon Good Thunder, because they were tied to their landscape

and traditions through their investment in the social landscape.

Good Thunder’s social landscape provided the residents with a strong sense of

place and connection to the past. At the annual Fourth of July celebration in 1952, for

2 John Frasier Hart, The Rural Landscape (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 301.

example, there was a float depicting the meeting of the pioneer Erv Sohre with

Wakuntchapinka at the ford. In an unfortunate coincidence, Charles Good Thunder, the

son of Andrew Good Thunder died at the age of 79 the Saturday prior to the parade. In

his will he left the citizens of Good Thunder a bow and set of arrows made by his father,

further cementing the ties of Good Thunder with its connections to the past and

continuing the promotion of the village as a tribute to the name of Good Thunder and

149

Figure 52: Good Thunder's Forde float, 4 July 1952 (Image

from the Good Thunder Herald, 3 July 1952.)

peaceful Indian-white relations. This connection developed into the annual PioneerIndian

Days, which was created by the Booster Club and the American Legion, and first

celebrated on Labor Day weekend in 1960, and continued on that weekend through the

1970s. Good Thunder also continued the free movies that it enjoyed since 1949 in the

high school gymnasium and continued to hold band concerts at the bandstand in the

summers. But there were also some events which marked a break with established

traditions. Heretofore the village council had been led by a president of the council

elected for a two year term. The council decided to change the name of that office to

mayor, and Good Thunder residents voted for a mayor rather than a president for the first

time in 1961. While this was not a significant change in the village government, it was a

150

severing of old terminology for the new, carried out to be in keeping with the times and

communicating that Good Thunder’s government was not moribund in the past.

Another example of Good Thunder’s unique culture was the change in practicing

Halloween. The Good Thunder Mother’s Club decided that Halloween was unsafe for

children and promoted irresponsible behavior. So the mothers created a Halloween Party

and actively discouraged door-to-door trick-or-treating, asking residents to not hand out

candy or answer trick-or-treat calls at their doors. They wanted all of the children to come

to the party, which began with a costume parade down Main Street, and had games, a

movie, and treats as the main event. The party was a success, with some one-hundred

sixty children attending, and for the first time in a while, Good Thunder enjoyed a tamer

All Hallows Eve. The police report to the Herald remarked that there was little sign of

“wild” celebrating except for some dumping of signs on the school grounds and some

cattle that were turned loose.

Transportation

Good Thunder saw very little in transportation developments between 1950 and

1975. The residents’ long battle for a paved road to Mankato finally came to fruition

shortly after 1950. The surfacing of road number one and its status change from a county

township road to State Highway 66 not only provided a smoother ride into the city and

likely cut the travel time in half, but as a state highway received priority snow plowing.

The beginning of the dying community era brought a harbinger of things to come

when regular passenger train service provided by the Central Railway Company of

Minnesota, a subsidiary of the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific Railroad,

terminated it service on the Wells to Mankato road on 2 January 1951. Several changes in

151

the overall cultural landscape contributed to the demise of passenger service, not the least

of which was the paving and development of highways paralleling many of the railroads

and the American fascination with the automobile. The passenger trains also carried the

mail, and this was by far the most profitable aspect of the service for the railroad

companies. When trucks began to take over this work, the railroads lost a significant

reason for their passenger rail service.

Sequent Occupance: The Business District

Good Thunder’s business district began a slow decline in some ways over the

twenty-five year span from 1950 to 1975, but in other areas businesses remained steady

and even grew. A few of the old guard stores on Main Street closed shop or were sold to

new owners. The Wiedenheft Bros. General Store began to phase out general merchandise

during the 1950s, and by the 1960s they only sold groceries. The brothers sold the store in

1969 to Burke Bartell who continued to operate it for some years before selling it to the

Happy Dan convenience store chain. In a similar fashion, the Sohre brothers retired from

the hardware business in 1965, selling the store to John Bartell who reopened it as

Bartell’s Hardware. The store survived for some years more, but eventually closed and

the building was demolished.

Another business closing occurred in 1951 when the blacksmith G. A. Graf

retired. Good Thunder still had a blacksmith for some years thereafter, however, because

a few months before Graf’s retirement, Richard Shearer began building a blacksmith shop

on property he purchased on the west end of town. Shearer was not the only self-

employed person to build new facilities. Roger Dalluge’s Dalluge Plumbing and Heating

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was doing enough business that he was able to build a shop in his back yard in 1951. The

shop contained space for sheet metal and a display room in the front with a nice big

window for showcasing equipment. Other developments included June Dales’ beauty

shop, which she opened at her residence in 1953, and the remodeling of the Botsford

Lumber Co.’s showroom, which the company wanted for featuring some new lines of

goods. During the 1950s the Gnadke family opened a duck hatchery in their former

restaurant building.19

Figure 53: Dalluge Plumbing & Heating, 1951

(Image from the Good Thunder Herald, 6 December 1951.)

The First National Bank of Good Thunder had excellent business in the post-war

years. The bank financed many of the remodeling projects and new homes which were

built in Good Thunder in the 1950s, running weekly advertisements presenting the

153

improvements, like the one in Figure 53 above. In 1952 the bank needed more space and

erected an extension to the building to add a large director’s room for meetings, two

conference rooms, another safe deposit box vault and enlarged the basement. The new

director’s room measured 15’ x 18’ and was finished with “modern glass block on two

sides.”

Figure 54: First National Bank addition, 1952

(Image from the Good Thunder Herald, 16 July 1953.)

Modern harvesting and livestock feeding changes also brought growth for the

Good Thunder Grain Co., owned and operated by Vince Mongeau. In 1955 Mongeau

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erected a new $30,000 storage bin added to the elevator site, as well as a new dryer, to

serve the needs of area farmers who wished to have grain dried and stored nearby. The

older gas dryer was moved to accommodate the additions. The new storage bin was

twenty-seven feet in diameter, rising to sixty-four feet and built to hold 27,000 bushels of

Figure 55: Grain storage bin, 1955

(Image from the Herald (Good Thunder, Minn.), 25 August 1955.)

grain. The need for silo storage continued to grow, and the Good Thunder Grain

Company added yet another storage silo to the complex in 1958 that could hold thirty

155

thousand bushels. The new silo was three feet wider and eight feet taller than the one

built three years prior.

Another sign of Good Thunder’s struggle to maintain its traditions of service in

the village came in 1956 when local business leaders and the village council formed the

Good Thunder Area Developments, Inc. for the purpose of recruiting a doctor and

building a clinic. Good Thunder had always enjoyed having at least one local doctor.

When the last doctor retired in 1955 and moved away a few years prior, the village was

left without medical services. The new corporation funded the construction of the clinic

through the sale of debenture bonds, which was approved in April 1956 by the Federal

Securities Commission. Fred Hiller bought the first bond year, leading the way for the

community to fully finance the clinic. The new clinic was designed to house two doctors

Figure 56: Architectural rendering of the Good Thunder Medical Clinic, 1956

(Image from the Herald (Good Thunder, Minn.), 10 May 1956.)

and a dentist, and included a laboratory, surgery, x-ray, and treatment rooms, with a

special room for infants. Additionally the building had a full basement, which the Good

Thunder Area Development offered for public library space; however, the county board

took no action on the offer. The clinic was completed in the same year and served the

community for about a decade before the practices were closed, probably due to the

increasing costs of health care and changes in health insurance programs. In 1958 the

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Good Thunder Area Developments added a new telephone company building in the same

architectural style next to the building, and the Good Thunder telephones were switched

over to the new building in August 1959.

Perhaps the most decisive blow to Good Thunder’s business district occurred on

Wednesday 16 March 1960 when two buildings on Main Street were destroyed by fire.

The fire started in the old Home Bakery store and burned through the apartments upstairs,

the roof, and Marlow’s Fairway Grocery next door. Although both buildings were

destroyed, the fire walls between the bakery and Petrowske Implements on the east, and

between the grocery and Segar Drugs on the west probably saved the rest of the block

from burning as well. Neither the grocery nor the bakery were rebuilt and neither

reopened. It might have been the beginning of the end for Main Street Good Thunder,

were it not for the Good Thunder Arts pottery shop that opened in the early 1970s, which,

coupled with two thriving antique stores, attracted buyers from around the region to Good

Thunder.

157

Figure 57: Fairway Foods and Home Bakery destroyed by fire, 1960

(Image from the Herald (Good Thunder, Minn.), 17 March 1960.)

158

Map 11: Fire Insurance Map of Good Thunder, 1964

This map details different types of buildings in Good Thunder. Note the garage on Front Street, the filling

stations on Ewing and Sherman Streets (inset bottom right) and Main and Front Streets, the city garage on

Sherman and Graham Streets (inset top left), and the two silos at the southern grain elevator.

(Map from Fire Underwriters Inspection Bureau Fire Insurance Maps from the collection of the Minnesota

Historical Society)

159

Sequent Occupance: The Residential Areas

Good Thunder gained some residential housing during this period. Of the existing

houses in 2005, only twenty-one were built between 1951 and 1975 and there were no

new additions to the village plat, nor subdivisions or developments of any of the existing

plat additions. The development pattern seems to have been one of filling in empty lots in

the existing residential areas. Most of the home building appears to have taken place in

the early 1950s, as evidenced by the advertisements in the Herald in 1951 by the First

National Bank of Good Thunder. The bank added a modern apartment in the second story

of its new addition in 1953, and refinished the existing apartment over the old part of the

bank. When the Gnadke’s closed their duck hatchery, they converted the building in 1965

into an apartment, which became residential thereafter.30 The architecture of the era was

typically the modern minimal style.

Minimal traditional architecture.

(Photograph from the Blue Earth County Assessor Office [online database])

Fig

re 58

: 421

lliday

Street, built

in 195

160

Minimal traditional architecture.

(Photograph from the Blue Earth County Assessor Office [online database])

Minimal traditional architecture.

(Photograph from the Blue Earth County Assessor Office [online database])

Fig

re 59

130

ddle

reet, built

in 19

Fig

re 60

129

ddle

reet, built

in 19

161

Sequent Occupance: Public Space

The Good Thunder volunteer fire department finally received a new home in 1966

to replace their existing building on Main Street next to the bank. The existing building

had been in use as a station since the 1930s, and had been renovated at that time for hand-

and horse-pulled equipment. It was too small to hold a modern fire tanker, so the

volunteer fire men had to use stock tanks on the backs of their trucks when fighting fires.

The village council brought the proposal to the voters in 1965 to decide on the bond issue

for funding the new station. The issue was passed for $12,000 in bonds to be raised for

the construction, which was supplemented by an additional $6,000 from the fire

department treasury. The new station was built and completed in the summer of 1966, and

the fire department held an open house for the residents on 25 September.

St. John’s Lutheran School began an extension to their school building in 1954,

which added two new classrooms and a library on the east side of the 1937 building. The

Figure

61:

Good Th

under

re Station,

1965

(

aph

cou

tesy

Sar

oeh

lich)

162

Good Thunder Public School also completed a new addition for the elementary grades in

1964, which was one story building just to the north of the old school building and the

high school.34 As the 1960s drew to a close, Good Thunder was faced with prospects of a

school consolidation with Amboy, which finally occurred in 1970. The consolidation

combined the school districts’ Kindergarten through sixth grades in the

Good Thunder school, and the seventh through twelfth graders at the Amboy school.

Sequent Occupance: The Churches

The churches of Good Thunder enjoyed a time of anniversary celebrations

between 1950 and 1975, as well as updates and remodeling to the structures. The first

anniversary celebration came in 1956 when St. Joseph’s Catholic Church celebrated its

diamond anniversary. According to the parishioners, the celebration should have been in

1955, but was delayed by one year because they wanted to make use of the new dining

hall for the celebration, which was under construction in 1954 and 1955. Further

improvements came in the early 1970s when tiling was laid around the building to

prevent water seepage, new carpeting was placed in the sanctuary and nave, and a

vestibule that was added to the front of the building in 1975.

163

Vestibule added in 1975. (Photograph by author)

St. John’s Lutheran Church also had various remodeling projects beginning in

1958 when the congregation decided to remodel the chancel, raise the floor of the church,

and add a new pulpit. They also added a kitchen in 1960-1961 on the north side of the

church building. In 1970 the congregation celebrated their one-hundredth anniversary,

held on 11 and 18 October which was marked by a special ringing of the clock tower

bells.40

The dying community era also saw the death of Good Thunder’s third church,

when the Immanuel Lutheran Church closed its doors. The congregation, which had

become smaller, merged with the Redeemer Lutheran Church in Decoria township in

Figure 62: St. Jos

eph's Catholic

Church,

2005

164

1960. The building stood unused for some years before it was torn down in the mid

1970s.

Conclusion

The short period of time during which Good Thunder evidenced characteristics of

a dying community also gave rise to themes that would become important in the decades

to come. Good Thunder saw the beginning of some growth in its first order residential

establishment during the early part of this era when the second order retail establishments

were still holding their own. However, the changes in the economy and growth of box

stores in urban centers also influenced changes in Good Thunder’s economic landscape,

particularly the decline of businesses on Main Street and the destruction of some of its

buildings by fire. In past eras business owners would have rebuilt and reopened the shops,

but the fact that these shops closed down and never reopened points out the economic

impracticability of such an endeavour. Although farmers began to bring in larger harvests

as a result of agricultural improvements, the farm labor force began to fall off during this

time. This was caused by better farm machinery that allowed for farming of more land

with fewer employees.

Good Thunder’s perception of their natural resource base was still focused on the

agricultural economy, with the idea that the town should be a small commerce and service

center for this economic base. The brief life of the medical clinic points out how the

village attempted to hold on to this concept and keep as many services as possible at

home. The inability to keep Main Street alive and provide jobs in the agricultural sector

forced residents to look to Mankato for jobs, services, and goods.

165

Good Thunder had not yet seen the path down which the future would lead it,

although the village may have caught a glimmer of that path in 1970 when the schools

were consolidated. The school consolidation was another feature of transitional

occupance which furthered the process of cultural substitution. Good Thunder began to

realize that it could no longer be all things for its residents, and the children of Good

Thunder were the first to experience that reality when the consolidation intermixed them

with children of other communities, exposing them to the cultures of other towns.

Two important themes for Good Thunder’s future and continued existence

developed during this time. The first was Good Thunder’s continuing connection to its

past and its history, which manifests in the annual Pioneer-Indian Days event. The second

theme was the growing art and antique community in the early 1970s, which would serve

as the basis for a radical idea—community rebirth through an economic base supported

by the art community.

Arts and heritage are key to community health and well-being, distinctive identity, and

collective pride. They act to preserve the history and identity of our diverse communities,

and offer a way to meaningfully evolve these traditions and identities into the future.

Chapter 9

The Phoenix Saga: Metamorphosis through Culture, 1975-2005

Cultural Landscape

166

Good Thunder’s recent history begins with the slow realization that its self-image

of place was no longer congruent or adaptable to the reality of the cultural landscape

without some sort of fundamental change. Halloween was still a party event for the

children until 1979 when door-to-door trick-or-treating was revived. The Booster Club

was still functioning, but they were not yet allowing women to join. The existing

businesses were trying to hold on, but most closed shop by 1980. The bank still had cages

and indoor décor from the early twentieth century with a matching philosophy on banking

practices. Good Thunder residents reminisced about the days when the village was self-

sufficient, when there were two banks and four grocery stores, when the hotel and the

passenger train were active, and when the clinic was offering medical services.3

A malaise had settled over the town in the early 1970s, which was particularly

evident in 1976 when no one filed to run for mayor. Some of the residents knew of a new

family who had moved to town the year before, however, that might offer some hope for

the village. John and Ann Christenson and their two children had moved to Good

Thunder from Florida in February 1975, seeking a home with land for gardening near

Mankato where John worked as the new director of the Traverse des Sioux Library

System. Having learned that he had been successful writing and receiving federal grants

in his career, the Good Thunder Mother’s Club, which was an active group in the village,

asked John to run as mayor and created a write-in campaign. The campaign was

successful, John won the election with 120 write-in votes, and began a new second career,

serving over fifteen years as mayor.4

The village began to rise from its own metaphorical ashes under Christenson’s

tenure as mayor, transforming through community involvement, cultural heritage, and a

167

daring idea to move the village into a new economic niche. The primary tool behind such

a metamorphosis, however, would not be possible without communication. The

importance of communication for this endeavour is evident in one of the first tasks the

village undertook down this new road of rebirth, which was the creation of a land use

plan for the village to guide future growth. The village employed a student from Gustavus

Adolphus College to conduct the assessment and write the plan under the guidance of the

Region Nine Development Commission, which addressed existing land use, soils, sewer

serviceable areas, transportation infrastructure, and topography.

The zoning policies are of particular interest in the land use plan, because they

3 Interview, 6 October 2005.

4 Interview, 27 July 2005; Interview, 6 October 2005; “Mayor Keeps Good Thunder Rolling,” Mankato

Free Press, [1979], undated newspaper article in the possession of the Blue Earth County Historical

illustrate a simple, practical approach to maintaining the existing state of Good Thunder

while allowing for growth and development. The agricultural zoning policy sought to

achieve balance by controlling “the location of future development so as to minimize

encroachment” on the important agricultural land in and around the village, as well as

promoting the “current farm size and operation trend.”5 The second zoning policy took

the logical stance of developing residential construction in existing vacant lots in the plat

before proceeding to expansion in existing neighborhoods or developing other areas for

residential purposes. Furthermore, areas identified as prime residential zones were to be

shielded from other types of development. The plan specifically called for development

south of Chapel Street and the northwest quadrant bounded by Miner and Shaubut

Streets.6 The plan called for commercial development to fill in vacant lots in the existing

commercial zone, which was maintaining its viability in the current location, and

suggested some expansion for some locations on Sherman Street. Finally, the light

168

industry in Good Thunder was suited to the current locations, primarily along the old rail

line, as well as the vacant corner of the village in the southwest that would be ideal

because of its fringe location and access to county highways 1 and 13. The plan also

identified environmental awareness as an issue to watch closely, especially calling for

evaluations of development proposals for areas with steep slopes, and to be mindful of

protecting natural vegetation.7 For the first time in its history, Good Thunder began to

define its landscape, put it into writing, and use it as a basis for planning and

communicating the needs of the village.

Society. The article states the railroad was abandoned “last spring.” The “Good Thunder Land Use Plan”

gives the date of last train before abandonment as 11 March 1978.

5 “Good Thunder Land Use Plan,” 10-11.

6 “Good Thunder Land Use Plan,” 10-11.

With the land use plan established, Good Thunder’s next task was to look at

community revitalization, particularly for the village’s downtown area. With the decline

of the Booster Club, due mainly to the loss of business owners and burn-out over the

years, Ann Christenson and Dennis Anderson re-formed the club as the Good Thunder

Area Chamber of Commerce. They presented a downtown revitalization plan in 1979 to

the village council, which incorporated elements from Good Thunder’s past commercial

district with current needs and cultural attitudes. Christenson and Anderson reasoned that

the “downtown area now seems to be at a point where major redevelopment could be

undertaken in steps without much disruption to existing businesses.” Specifically, the plan

called for the existing hardware store with the addition of a new grocery store, lumber

yard, and small shops, all of which used to exist and thrive in the downtown block. To

meet the current needs of the community, the plan proposed a municipal building and

community center, with an enclosed walkway and a landscaped seating area. The plan

169

also incorporated the energy conservation awareness resulting from the energy crisis of

the 1970s by including solar heating for the development, thus synthesizing aspects of

past and present landscapes. The village council approved the Chamber’s request to

proceed with a determination of applicant eligibility, a necessary first step in seeking a

federal Urban Development Action Grant.

By 1980, the Good Thunder commercial district was ailing, and described in a

Mankato Free Press article thus: “Downtown Good Thunder today is two rows of

dilapidated buildings. The old drug store and one other building are vacant. Others are in

very poor shape. The second floor of the liquor store and municipal building, for

example, is condemned.” As the downtown had deteriorated over the previous thirty

Figure 63: Main Street, ca. 1980

View to the north. Demolition of derelict buildings from the 1880s. The corner of Houk Street is out of

frame to the right of the image. (Photograph from the collection of the Blue Earth County Historical

Society)

years and was in dire need of rebuilding, Mayor Christenson created a plan to apply for

federal funds. The plan involved the assistance of Professor Peter Dahm’s Urban and

Regional Studies students in his downtown redevelopment seminar at Mankato State

University, who would prepare the village’s Urban Development Action Grant. The only

170

concept the students were instructed to keep was the concept of “Good Thunderness” in

their plans. In other words, the students’ redevelopment plans needed to incorporate the

flavor of the Good Thunder cultural landscape.

The students broke up into a few groups and created their plans after visiting the

village, conducting some field work, and getting a sense of “Good Thunderness.”

Initially, there was some resistance to Christenson’s plan to use students to design and

write the grant. One village resident remarked: “What are a bunch of students gonna

know? They’re just kids, and they haven’t lived in Good Thunder.” When the students

were done, they came to Good Thunder to present their plans to the village. All of the

plans called for the demolition of the buildings on the north side of Main Street between

Houk and Front Streets except for the bank. The students’ plans varied from modern to

historical styles. One plan presented a modern-style redevelopment which some of the

residents liked, and another sought to preserve “Good Thunderness” by recreating the feel

of historic buildings, and added mid-block projections into Main Street to offset the

feeling of distance in the eighty-foot wide street. The villagers attending the presentation

171

Figure 64: Plan for Main Street revitalization, 1980

(Image from the Mankato Free Press, 15 February 1980.)

particularly liked the self-service gas station, lumber store, and earth-sheltered municipal

building. The plans were well received by the villages, and even the resident who voiced

doubts before the presentation left saying “They really captured the feeling of the town.”

Although the Urban Development Action Grant, as well as all the other grants for

which Good Thunder applied, were unsuccessful, they set up the beginnings of Good

Thunder’s plan for revitalization for the coming decade. In 1984 the village council

applied for a $30,000 grant from the Blue Earth County Small Cities Economic

172

Development Commission which was successful. With the grant, the village created a

$15,000 revolving loan program which lent $500 to $2,000 to local businesses to remodel

and refurbish the downtown buildings. Throughout the rest of the 1980s, the program

brought an auto body shop, allowed a filling station that had closed in 1984 to re-open,

provided financing for Bruscke’s hardware, that otherwise would have closed, and

attracted a dentist and beautician to open shop.13

Art and Community

The other half of the grant from Blue Earth County went to the Good Thunder

Development Corporation, a non-profit entity formed by Ann Christenson and Dennis

Anderson in 1984, which took up the void left by the Booster Club. The purpose of the

corporation was to cultivate an arts and crafts niche for Good Thunder in the economic

landscape, because the city could no longer afford to “depend on its traditional

agricultural economy, nor [was] it in a strong competitive position to attract commerce

and industry.” The corporation felt the name Good Thunder was “highly marketable,” and

that the village could play off the unique name and the healthy art and antique

community developing in the village. The Corporation’s rationale was:

“Rather than compete with every other rural Minnesota community for business

or industry, the Good Thunder Development Corporation is trying to create a

niche for Good Thunder as a rural center for the arts. . . . We feel our arts thrust

has the potential to stimulate cottage industry as well as traditional work in the

arts and crafts, providing employment and opportunity to many who have not

been able to afford the basics for even part time work of this nature. The impact

of their increased purchasing power will affect our local businesses. To our

knowledge, no other rural community has undertaken a project of this nature.

While we recognize the risk, we feel that an extraordinary attempt to develop an

untapped resource is necessary.”

173

The first step in the corporation’s grand plan was a project entitled “Painting on a

Grand Design,” which was to paint a mural of the village’s cultural history, to attract

attention and new residents, and to be a “beacon to artists wanting to live in a small

town.”17 The project took “advantage of that ubiquitous feature of Midwestern

landscape—the grain elevator—and [turned] it into a vehicle of artistic expression. It

[was] the centerpiece and inaugural activity for an ongoing effort to attract artists and

craftspeople to Good Thunder.” “Painting on a Grand Design” won the Minneapolis

Valspar Corporation’s Minnesota Picture-It-Beautiful Competition that yielded 1,100

gallons of paint for the project.18

The project also marked a turning point for Good Thunder. Although the Good

Thunder Development Corporation developed the idea and pursued the grants necessary

to realize the project, many of the long time residents were ambivalent about the project

at first.19 The corporation commissioned noted St. Paul muralist Ta-Coumba Aiken, who

had always wanted to paint on a grain elevator, to develop and paint the village’s

history.20

174

(Photograph by author)

17 Mark Steil, “Good Thunder: Main Street Economics,” Mainstreet Radio, Minnesota Public Radio, 6

October 1997, audio and transcript available at http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/

199710/06_steilm_thunder-m/, accessed 16 July 2005.

18 [Christenson], “Good Thunder Grain Elevator Mural.”

19 Marjorie Casey, “The Arts Revive a Prairie Town,” in A Rural Arts Sampler: Fostering Creative

Partnerships (Washington, D.C.: National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, 1992), 24; Interview, 6

October 2005.

20 Mark Steil, “Good Thunder: Main Street Economics,” Mainstreet Radio, Minnesota Public Radio, 6

October 1997; Christenson, “Good Thunder on a Minnesota Grain Elevator,” 17-18.

gure 6

nti

g on

and

Desi

" mural

175

Figure 66: Detail of storage silo murals

Clockwise from top left: deer representing abundant wildlife, John Deere tractor, Robert Stratton, VFW

color guard, and boys playing in the snow. (Photograph by author)

Aiken worked with the community to select the images that would be painted,

integrating photographs and personal memories to create a “family photo album” of Good

Thunder on the elevator and two of the storage silos. Aiken began on the mural in the

summer of 1987 and completed it in 1988. The first part of the mural to be painted was

the forty-foot portrait of Andrew Good Thunder which dominates the north-facing side of

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Figure 67: Mural detail on the south face of the elevator Detail

of R. L. Houk. (Photograph by author)

the elevator, and can be seen for miles, greeting visitors and residents as they come into

the village from Mankato. Below him, Aiken represents Wakuntchapinka as a

Winnebago encampment because there is no portrait of the Winnebago chief, with

Andrew Good Thunder’s outstretched hand over the encampment linking to two Indian

peoples. The west-facing side of the elevator portrays the Graham House hotel with John

G. Graham and his wife Loretta Barnard Graham towering beside the hotel. Other images

in the mural are a John Deere tractor from the 1970s tractorcade protest, a steam tractor

from the early 1900s, a horse-drawn plow from the late 1800s, a large deer representing

the bounty of wildlife, children at play in the snow, Robert Stratton, a soldier killed in

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World War II, with an American Legion color guard standing in front of his image, and R.

L. Houk, one of the original founders of the village and first owner of the elevator. Aiken

also added an image of his own to the mural, two children with a computer in a corn

field, which embody Aiken’s “vision of the future for rural America—a dream that

technology, agriculture and small town values can merge and encourage young people to

pursue careers in rural towns.”

The mural put Good Thunder on the proverbial map. The project was picked up

by news media across the region. A Twin Cities news station reporter came in a helicopter

and landed on Main Street to cover the story. It was covered in all the Twin Cities

newspapers and TV stations, in other newspapers across the region and the state, and on

Minnesota Public Radio. The mural also made headlines in papers across the nation and

even internationally when the story was covered on the BBC. This recognition of a

village portraying its history as art helped to renew a spark of community pride.

But the mural brought much more than just community pride and brief notoriety

to the community. Aiken in particular, a likable and dynamic person, was instrumental in

bringing the people together to make it their mural, their story, and even had the

community participating in painting the portion of the mural depicting the Winnebago

encampment. When the Good Thunder Development Corporation began soliciting

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