History Lesson on Spring Grove Main Street

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.