By Betsy Adams  

To put it bluntly, rather than romantically, the lost township of Hennepin is simply a land speculator’s scheme gone bust. According to the Minnesota Historical Society, Hennepin, “a short-lived village platted in 1852 on a portion of John H. McKenzie’s claim in sections 34 and 35, Eden Prairie, on the Minnesota River, was, during several years, a shipping point for grain. It had a store, a gristmill, a saw mill, a blacksmith shop, several homes, a hotel and a warehouse by the ferry. No traces remain.”  But, as Helen Holden Anderson says in her "Eden Prairie, The First 100 Years," towns like Hennepin “show the hopes and ambitions of the early settlers to develop this territory, as well as demonstrate man’s innate courage and perhaps foolishness in his unending search for new frontiers of wealth.”

After the War of 1812, the U. S. government took physical possession of the valuable Northwest frontier by establishing a chain of Indian agencies and supporting forts from Lake Michigan to the Missouri River. Fort Snelling, completed in 1825, was one such fort, strategically situated at the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers. For almost 30 years, Fort Snelling was the hub of the Upper Mississippi; not only as a military center but also the take-off point for exploration and settlement.

By 1849, when it had aligned enough political and economic influence, Minnesota became a Territory. But it was obvious, even then, that to really prosper the area needed lots and lots of people. A variety of groups and individuals - newspaper editors, guidebook authors, excursionist, organized colonies of settlers, government officials and speculators - promoted Minnesota’s acclaimed advantages. And promote they did. They praised the territory’s natural resources, agriculture and lumbering, healthful climate and the superiority of its people in morality, virtue, thrift, industriousness, enterprise and intellect. It worked - the population exploded. And with the pioneers seeking land and freedom, came the speculators hoping to profit.

In 1851 John Holmes and John McKenzie loaded a flat boat with provisions and building materials and ascended the Minnesota River to Chief Shakopee’s village. Here, Holmes built a trading post and started trading with the Indians. McKenzie continued to scout the Minnesota River to find his own land. Records show that the next year, he had made a claim on sections 34 and 35 in the future township of Eden Prairie. McKenzie and nine other non-resident businessmen, civic leaders and land speculators platted a portion of the claim into village lots and called the proposed town Hennepin. A very early account, by Chicagoan S. B. Wason, published in The Weekly Minnesotan, August 28, 1852, tells of his own search for a “place suitable for a new colony” along the Minnesota River. When as he arrives in Eden Prairie, his narrative continues, “I found McKenzie in a small board shanty at this place. He has the handsomest town site that I have seen since I left home, but he has done nothing on it yet…. I cannot help thinking that this will soon become a large town, elevated as it is about one hundred feet above the Minnesota River, and backed by so large an extent of good farming country.”

While McKenzie squatted on his land, many new arrivals were making their claims and settling onto the rich farmland on the bluff. “We lived about 4 miles from Shakopee,” wrote Mrs. Frederick Penny in "Old Rail Fence Corners," “at what was called Eden Prairie. My father was William O. Collins ... and he bought land and a log cabin in 1853. Three miles below our place was Hennepin Landing where the boats landed coming from St. Paul. There were at that time a dozen or 15 settlers in that vicinity, among them the Goulds, the Mitchells, Mr. Abbott and Mr. Gates. There came about that time Mr. Staring, who lived immediately east of us.”

The heyday of steam boating on the Minnesota River was the 10-year period from 1855-1865, when almost 3,000 departures from St. Paul were recorded. Steamboat travel was rarely uneventful in the early years. Helen Anderson writes, “The best boats had to stop and gather wood for fuel in riverside forests. Their smokestacks frequently were demolished by overhanging boughs and their hulls ware punctured by snags. These mishaps caused the passengers to while away hours on the banks, telling stories, hunting or picking wild berries.”

So Eden Prairie grew but what happened to McKenzie’s utopian regional metropolis? During these Territorial years many ‘paper towns’ were platted and promoted in hopes of cashing in on ballooning land values. Some flourished, some were quickly abandoned. The 1855 plat map of Eden Prairie shows the grid that was to be Hennepin at the bend in the river but subsequent maps show no such town or mention of McKenzie. Sources suggest the causes for failure were:

n              Much of the site itself was unbuildable with the steep river bluffs to the north and the boggy conditions of much of the river side

n              Proximity to the growing towns of Shakopee, Chaska and Carver which were situated on level ground, and the devastating financial Panic of 1857.  

The commercial site called Hennepin failed to flourish and was abandoned but the land was quickly bought and turned over to farming. Territorial guidebook author Ephraim Seymour effusively promoted the area’s agricultural potential with words like, “It will, ere long, be dotted with farmhouses, and enlivened with the songs of multitudes of cheerful and thriving husbandmen {farmers].” (Now there’s a utopian picture for you.)

As the settlers established their farms, the river became the means for transporting their abundant wheat crops to market. But the commercial significance of the river for Eden Prairie farmers was overshadowed when the Minneapolis-St. Louis Railroad came to town in 1871.

Today, the Hennepin site is recorded as a “ghost town” by the State Historical Preservation Office but represents a “potential archeological district, worthy of further investigation.” If you look at present-day maps of the western-most end of River Road in Eden Prairie, you will see the sharp bend in the Minnesota River. That hillside slope and river bottom land is ... was ... Hennepin. All private land now, it is still hoped that someday a thorough archeological survey will be conducted and perhaps more mysteries solved.

 Betsy Adams is an Eden Prairie resident, student of Eden Prairie history and chair of the city's Heritage Preservation Commission.

 Click here for a map of Hennepin Village.