Ramsey County History – Summer 1999: “Growing Up in St. Paul: The Story of Life on the Farm in a Changing World with Changing Fortunes”

Growing Up in St. Paul: The Story of Life on the Farm in a Changing World with Changing Fortunes

Authors: Henry H. Morgan and Samuel H. Morgan

This is an account of the authors’ mother’s side of the family on their large farm in what is today the Midway area of St. Paul from the 1860s to about 1910. Much of the source material can be found in Henry H. Morgan’s book, Four Pioneer Families of Minnesota (1998). Their great-grandfather, Judge Daniel A.J. Baker, purchased the land for the farm in the 1860s at the western edge of Ramsey County. Grandmother Cornelia Baker was a source for much of what they learned about the early years at the farm. In 1880 she married Henry Rice Hollinshead, a civil engineer who worked for the railroads. The result is a rich, lively, and entertaining family portrait that ends with the farm having to be sold off in parcels in the 1890s and 1900s to pay off multiple mortgages that the family was not able to refinance following the Panic of 1893.

PDF of Growing Up in Saint Paul