Eyes on Main Street - April 26th
Here is a short history lesson written by Robert Vogel last September. There are a few additions by Georgia Rosendahl and Saundra Solum.
Spring Grove’s Main Street was laid out when the
village was platted in 1859. The street originally dead-ended in front of
Trinity Lutheran Church (where it interested the old Brownsville & Decorah
Road, which followed modern-day Maple Drive and Stage Road). Georgia said it was a stage coach road so it veered on the North Side of the city park. Remember the original church was on the north end of the Trinity Lutheran Church lot.
According to Percival Narveson, "It was largely through the efforts of Mons Fladager that the main business section of Spring Grove was located where it is. Previous to 1859 the town was strung out for over half a mile east and west on the territorial road. With the coming of the railroad in 1879, Fladager platted his land and sold lots, and through his efforts the railroad company abandoned its plan of building a station in Smith's Grove and erected it a quarter-mile west. Thereafter, Smith's Grove gradually was abandoned."
The first
downtown sidewalks were installed shortly after the village was incorporated in
1889 but these structures deteriorated quickly and in 1939 the village council
decided to replace them with concrete.
State Highway 44 was established by the state legislature in
1920 as part of Minnesota’s original trunk highway system. It
followed existing wagon roads between Caledonia and Mabel. The rural
portion of the highway was graded and graveled to a 30 ft. width by the state
in 1926; the Main Street segment was dirt-surfaced until 1940, when the state
laid the last sections of bituminous pavement on TH 44 between La Crescent and
US Highway 63 south of Spring Valley.
Spring Grove built its municipal sanitary sewer system in
1930. The system was designed by Druar and Milinowski, consulting
engineers, whose offices were in the old Globe Building in downtown Saint
Paul. (Arthur Milinowski was the son of German immigrants and a Harvard
man; John Druar was a New Yorker who took his civil engineering degree at
Cornell University.) The sanitary sewer lines were laid in hand-dug
trenches running down Main and the side streets. (The village had had a
rudimentary water system since the early 1900s and new cast-iron water main was
laid under Main Street when the municipal water works was established in 1927.)
The interest rate on the sewer bonds was 5-1/2%, which prompted the
village to call in the 1930 bonds and issue $16,000 worth of new bonds at a
lower interest rate in the summer of 1941. The first wastewater treatment
plant was not built until 1940.
Highway 44 was reconstructed through Spring Grove between
1938 and 1941 as part of several different infrastructure projects. The
state surveyed the rural portions of the highway in 1938 and surfaced the
highway with bituminous paving at a cost of over $316,000. The Main
Street segment of the TH 44 improvement cost approximately $50,000 and was
financed in part with a $22,500 federal grant from the Public Works
Administration, which was the agency responsible for implementing Franklin
Roosevelt’s financial stimulus program during the Great Depression; this
project was administered out of the PWA office in Omaha, NE, with the state highway
department responsible for design; the city council handled much of the local
project administration and paid for its share of the project with funds raised
from a $20,000 bond issue. The federal government appropriated $38,729
for the project, which represented about 40% of the total cost. Unfortunately,
none of the entities involved kept particularly detailed or accurate financial
records, so it’s a little hard to come up with a total cost for the
original Main Street improvements—probably somewhere in the neighborhood
of $60,000, I would guess. (To adjust for inflation, multiply the
historic figures by 20 and you will be close.) The paving was reinforced
concrete, 44 ft. wide (this is the average street width) and 8 inches thick. The
plans and specifications included installation of water mains, storm and
sanitary sewer as well as improvement of the highway and side streets. At
the same time as the TH 44 project, Spring Grove undertook several other public
works projects involving street grading and paving, storm sewer construction,
sanitary sewer system improvements, and an entire new system of water
connections; this work was coordinated with the highway project and it was also
funded with a mix of city bonding and federal grants. The sewer and water
work, as well as paving of side streets, was done under the auspices of the US
Works Progress Administration, a New Deal work relief program that provided
jobs to the able-bodied unemployed. (Under the WPA regulations, Spring
Grove would have been required to pay for the cost of materials and equipment;
the federal government paid labor costs.) The WPA’s concrete paving
is holding up well on 1st, 2nd, and 3rd avenues and on the streets surrounding Viking Park. The work began in
1939 and was completed in 1941. Old photographs indicate modern street
lights were installed sometime after World War II (the village has had street
lights downtown since the 1890s). The present cobra-style light standards
appear to be of 1960s vintage. Some of the old late-1940s era street
lights are still standing on Maple next to the park and near the school.
The original Highway 44 reconstruction did not extend very
far east of the city park. The present route of Highway 44 east of
Maple/Division was surveyed in the 1920s, a few years after the park had been
established. The segment of TH 44 between downtown Spring Grove and
Caledonia was rebuilt shortly after World War II. Much of the work in
Spring Grove appears to have been done by the state between 1945 and 1949.
In 1979 TH 44 between Spring Grove and Mabel was widened. There were some
improvements made to Main Street by the state highway department in 1988 and
the water connections (but not the mains) were replaced up and down Main Street
around this time. MnDOT records show a mill and overlay of Main Street
between 3rd Ave. NW and 4th Ave. NE in 1998.
In 2012, Main Street is over 150 years old. The
underground utilities are between 82 and 71 years old (some of the water main may
be even older). The water connections from the mains to inside the
buildings is about 44 years old. The present road surface is 73 years
old. Very little of the original concrete sidewalk laid in 1939-40
remains.
The Last Main Street Project. 1939.. (notice the horses!)
