The Battle Over the Cold Spring Dam: Farm-Village Conflict and Contested Identity among Rural German Americans

STEPHEN J. GROSS

THIS IS A STORY of a fight.
The setting is rural Minnesota, the time is the turn of the century, and the fight was over an old mill dam. The dam, which still stands, lay astride the Sauk River on the eastern edge of Cold Spring in the heavily German-Catholic Stearns County, and in 1900 its future status divided a group of area farmers and a clique of young and ambitious merchants from Cold Spring. The farmers, all of whom were Catholic and of German descent and who generally went to church in the neighboring village of Richmond, pushed for the dam's removal and hoped for the reclamation of pastureland long lost to the dam's backwaters. The merchants, on the other hand, who were also uniformly German and for the most part Catholic, saw the dam as vital to the area's economic growth and anticipated developing the small chain of lakes created by the structure and promoting tourism to the area. This, then, is a story of town and country conflict. But it is also a story about economic development, the shifting patterns of primary economic activities, the implications of regional growth and the integration of the local economy into a larger commercial system.