Paper Towns & Other Imaginary Worlds / Frontier Fortunes and Mississippi Mansions

Paper Towns and Other Imaginary Worlds, also, Frontier Fortunes and Mississippi Mansions. . The history of Minnesota is replete with stories of boomtowns becoming ghost towns. Sometimes their demise was caused by national or historical shifts in markets, such as the fading of the fur trade or the bottoming out of the wheat market. Other luckless hamlets prospered for a while only to fade as an anticipated railroad or highway bypassed them. But some of the most intriguing lost towns are the "paper towns" of the late 1800s – towns that were speculated into existence by prophets and profiteers but never constructed. Complete with dozens of residential blocks, elaborate parks and beckoning schools, these imaginary towns only existed on paper until investors could be found to turn them into realities. Many never even came to fruition. In Dakota County one town tat started as a utopian dream on paper was Nininger City. It was the brainchild of one of early Minnesota's most eccentric personalities. It was a paper town that barely made it into the real world before it abruptly folded, vanishing forever from map and memory., A Modern Atlantis , The chief promoter of Nininger City was Ignatius Donnelly, a native Philadelphian who came to Minnesota in 1856. He and a few partners founded Nininger City as a utopian cooperative farm community just upstream from Hastings on the Mississippi River. The community was to be a welcoming alternative for new immigrants seeking a place of enlightened cooperative and liberal values. The financial "Panic of 1857," however, brought the project to an immediate halt., Unbowed, Donnelly was elected lieutenant governor in 1859, and went on to publish a number of widely read books. In one of Donnelly's works he argued that Shakespeare's plays were actually the work of Francis Bacon. In another he told the history of Atlantis, a world he claimed had once existed near the Strait of Gibraltar. In a third, he speculated that an ancient giant comet had grazed the earth causing the flood depicted in the ible, the extinction of mammoths, and the destruction of Atlantic., Caption: Ignatius Donnelly (1831-1901). Promoter, author, and visionary, ran for Vice President in 1900 as the nominee of the Populist Party., To Dust Again , It was Donnelly's highly imaginative spirit, which speculated about Shakespeare, Atlantis and geology, that contrived to bring Nininger City into existence. In the end his belief in Nininger was as misplaced as his belief in Atlantis. By 1869 the only house left standing in Nininger City was Donnelly's own. While the Township of Nininger remains, the city, perhaps following the example of his beloved Atlantis, had simply disappeared., The Nininger residence of Ignatius Donnelly (shown in the circle) was razed in 1948, after an unsuccessful attempt to make the house and town site a state park., As an elected official, Donnelly was a progressive and an early proponent for funding the education of freed slaves and women's suffrage., Although consistent in his populist beliefs, Donnelly was less so in his party affiliation, switching between Republican, Democrat and Populist parties. He also ran as an Independent!, Caption: Plat map of Nininger. The city had a population of 1,000 at its peak., [reverse] , As river-related business grew in the 1800s, many fortunes were made in the new commerce of grain milling, logging and real estate speculation. As money poured into the young towns on the Upper Mississippi, their early frontier lifestyle gave way to a world of conspicuous consumption and high culture. Tastefully designed mansions began sprouting along the banks of the river in towns that previously had been rather shabby affairs. One such mansion is the historic LeDuc House in Hastings., Gentlemen of Substance and Style , William LeDuc was an Ohio native who came to Minnesota in 1850. Along with Alexis and Henry Bailly and General Henry Hastings Sibley, LeDuc acquired the land that would become the town of Hastings. He correctly anticipated that the upper falls of the Vermilion River would provide for a profitable milling operation and a prosperous city. The town of Hastings did grow rapidly thanks to the booming wheat market. Its population soon exceeded St. Paul, creating a building boom and generating a hefty profit for LeDuc and his partners., LeDuc, after serving as a distinguished officer in the Union Army during the Civil War, returned to Hastings in 1865. Using the then fashionable "plan books" authored by the popular Hudson River Valley architect and landscape architect, Andrew Jackson Downing, he had his own house built on a large agricultural estate on the edge of town. Completed in 1866 and almost unaltered today, the house is a classic example of the highly detailed architectural style, Gothic Revival., Like many other estates found along the upper Mississippi River, the setting of LeDuc's mansion was picturesque - an idealized, pastoral landscape that followed the tenets of Downing and the Hudson River Valley School. So captivating were these homes and landscapes that the Mississippi River Valley was then frequently referred to as "The American Rhine.", Caption: William LeDuc opened this bookstoe in St. Paul, the first in Minnesota., Vermilion Falls (shown in circle), one of Minnesota's most powerful and picturesque waterfalls, powered LeDuc's mill that produced the first spring wheat flour ever milled in Minnesota., President Abraham Lincoln created the Department of Agriculture in 1862. LeDuc, when he became the department's head under President Rutherford B. Hayes, promoted the production of tea in the United States.