The History of Carver Park

Well, as Liz rightly pointed out, my post for this past week was not at all what the assignment said. I had accidentally pasted the wrong document into the blog, so she unfortunately had to read a crazy creation story I had written a while back. Unfortunately, I also destroyed the document that I originally meant to post (I had been cleaning out my cluttered desktop and figured that the document I posted was no longer in need of being stored on my computer – wrong on that one). So I am going to do my best to rewrite what I remember of what should have been my last posting.
As some of you may know, I am from Minnesota. I’ve spent pretty much my entire life before college at my home in Victoria, Minnesota, a town of about 4,000 people that pretty much makes up the edge of the Twin Cities suburbs. I live on the outskirts of the town and am surrounded by farmland that has been convert over the past decades into a park reserve approximately 3,700 acres in size, over twice the size of the Mines of Spain here in Dubuque. The park is called Carver Park and is very similar to the Mines of Spain, but without the bluffs, of course, and with the addition of four large lakes, several smaller lakes and a host of ponds and wetlands. This is where I spent a lot of my childhood since the only other kids in my five-house neighborhood moved away when I was about five or six.
There are several old building foundations scattered throughout the park from barns and farm houses that have long since crumbled or been destroyed. There is also a historic house in the park that belonged to the Grimm family that emigrated from Germany, and created the first winter-hardy alfalfa which is now grown across the country. Many other farms were scattered through the land that is now park area, but have since been forgotten and overgrown with young forests of maple and basswood. My own home and neighborhood is located on land that was once farmland, belonging to one of my neighbor’s families.
It is my neighbor that I think would be most helpful in collecting information about the land around Victoria and the families that first lived there before the old farms were turned into park land. My neighbor is called “Uncle Ron” by most people who know him well, which is a good portion of the town. He is very active in town affairs and I’m sure has scores of knowledge about what life was like before the park was made. He lived around the time that the houses in our neighborhood were built and may even remember or have photographs of what the area looked like early in the 1900s.
Some of the obstacles in collecting information may simply be the availability of the history of the town. I’m not sure what information has all been saved through the years and much has surely been lost. Also, as older population in the town dwindles, many of the memories disappear as well. It would also be difficult to get specific information that I would need to recreate the sense of life when all was still farmland. The old minds of the town have surely become somewhat more forgetful and may prove to be more difficult that anything. For the book itself, I would want to make a format as some kind of memoir of what the land looked like before it was suburbanized and turned into park reserve. I would likely use a lot of old photographs and try to recreate maps of what the town looked like in older times in order to give a sense of what life was like before cars buzzed all over the land. It would certainly be an interesting undertaking and would add to my appreciation of the natural beauty of the parkland I grew up on.