Latest / Pionerd / From County Poor Farm to the Great Minnesota Get-Together: Dan Patch, the 1885 Compromise, and the Ground That Holds the Whole State
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- INTRO: Minnesota State Fair History: How a County Poor Farm Became the Great Minnesota Get-Together The gates closed yesterday. The last of the festivalgoers filed out carrying half-eaten buckets of cookies and a sunburn. Twelve days of the Minnesota State Fair, ending on Labor Day the way it has since 1975. Today the grounds belong to the cleanup. Hundreds of vendors are breaking down booths across three hundred and twenty-two acres. Last year vendors and exhibitors raked in $17.5 million. This ground was never built for any of that. It was a county poor farm. Ramsey County owned 210 acres, and it gave them away. Before that, the fair had no home at all. Minneapolis wanted it. St. Paul wanted it. For 25 years neither city would let the other have it. Then, on September 8, 1906, the last day of the fair, a horse ran one mile on this ground in one minute and fifty-five seconds. ACT I: The Roving Minnesota State Fair, 1855–1884: Fort Snelling, Rochester, Owatonna and the Grasshopper Years The governing body of the Minnesota State Fair is older than Minnesota. Farmers and merchants founded the Minnesota Territorial Agricultural Society in 1854, four years before statehood. The job was to highlight agriculture and encourage farming in the region. The first territorial fair opened in Minneapolis in 1855. In 1857 it moved to St. Paul. In 1858, the year Minnesota entered the Union, there was no fair at all. The new state lacked the funds. The first state fair came in 1859, in Minneapolis. Then the wandering began. 1860 hosted the fair at Fort Snelling. There was no fair in 1861, and none in 1862 because of the Civil and U.S.–Dakota Wars. After that, there was twenty years of moving. Fort Snelling again. Red Wing. Minneapolis. Rochester. Winona. St. Paul. and Owatonna. The traveling fairs were hard to organize, and they were often poorly attended. Then the grasshoppers came. Between 1874 and 1876, a plague destroyed crops across Minnesota, and the displays at the fair shrank with them. The rivalry did not let up. When the fair was held outside Minneapolis, Minneapolis citizens organized a competing fair of their own. The dispute got loud enough that the President of the United States weighed in. According to State Fair archives, Rutherford B. Hayes offered advice on settling the location question during a speech in St. Paul in 1878. A sitting president, refereeing an argument over where to put a state fair. ACT II: Henry S. Fairchild and the Ramsey County Poor Farm: The Minnesota State Fair Finds a Permanent Home in 1885 In 1884, the Agricultural Society put together a committee to select a permanent site. They looked at land around Minnehaha Falls. Then Henry S. Fairchild, of the St. Paul Chamber of Commerce, suggested the place the fair occupies today. The Ramsey County Poor Farm, the first county-run poor farm in Minnesota. It was a a self-supporting agricultural property that provided food, housing, and care for poor, sick, and elderly people. It was politically neutral ground, about halfway between the two cities. The Ramsey County Board of Commissioners donated all 210 acres of it. The gates opened on September 7, 1885, 141 years ago, yesterday. Not in Falcon Heights, at the time the site was known as the city of Hamline, in Rose Township. Crews constructed a wooden grandstand, a main agricultural building, and a run of stock barns. The fair ran six days. The poor farm's almshouse became the fair's administration building. It stood until windstorms damaged it, and it was razed. The traditions started fast. In 1887, a Civil War re-enactment drew 80,000 people to the grandstand, staged while the war was still fresh. In 1897, women from Hamline Church opened a dining hall on the grounds, serving ham loaf and pie. It is still open, and it’s the longest-running food concession at the fair. There was no fair in 1893. It conflicted with the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Then, in 1899, electricity arrived. The grounds could stay open after sunset for the first time, and the grandstand hosted its first evening show, a fireworks presentation called "The Burning of Manila.”, which reenacted the American Navy's attack during the Spanish-American War. It was a massive hit and launched a long-running tradition of nightly fireworks. ACT III: September 8, 1906 — Dan Patch's 1:55 Mile, the Grandstand He Built, and the Faribault Invention That Became the Tilt-A-Whirl He was born in 1896, sired by a champion pacer, and by the standards of harness racing he had three problems. Long legs. Knobby knees, and a sweet disposition, which nobody wanted in a racehorse. His first owner looked him over and said the horse would be good for hauling a delivery wagon. Dan Patch was a pacer. He pulled a driver behind him in harness. He lost two heats in his entire career, never lost a final race, and eventually other owners simply refused to enter horses against him. So he raced the clock instead. In December of 1902, a Minneapolis businessman named Marion Savage bought him for sixty thousand dollars, about 1.2 million in today's money. Savage sold feed and tonics to Midwestern farmers, and he put the horse on the advertising. Within a year, company sales went from one million dollars to five. Then came Saturday, September 8, 1906. Closing day of the fair. In front of the grandstand, Dan Patch paced one mile in one minute and fifty-five seconds. A world record. It stood until 1938. Savage renamed his farm in Savage, Minnesota, the International 1:55 Stock Food Farm. A boy in Missouri named Harry Truman wrote the horse a fan letter. Dan Patch died on July 11, 1916. Marion Savage died thirty hours later. The grandstand did not outlast him either. It came down after the 1908 fair. The building that replaced it in 1909 is the one still standing today, and it picked up a nickname, the house that Dan Patch built. The grounds grew with it. In 1907 the fair bought forty acres to the north, and that became Machinery Hill. The same year it put up the two buildings that are still the oldest on the fairgrounds, now the Fine Arts Center and the Progress Center. In 1910, the first airplane flight in Minnesota took place on these fairgrounds. Twenty years later, the fair added a ride that came from Faribault. Herbert Sellner was an inventor there. He built a water toboggan that sold as far as France and Switzerland. He also built a water merry-go-round on a lake outside Faribault, one boat pulling the rest behind it, but a storm destroyed it in 1925. His brother Martin told him to build it again on dry land. Sellner started sketching in January of 1926. He called it the Tilt-ulator. He filed the patent in Minneapolis on April 24, and within a month he had changed the name to The Tilt-A-Whirl. By the third of September it was running at the Minnesota State Fair. Rides cost fifteen cents. That was a hundred years ago this summer. ACT IV: The A.O. Smith Propeller Plant, Polio, and the Pronto Pup: The Minnesota State Fair in the 1940s In June of 1943, the federal government moved in. Fifty acres and the livestock buildings went to the A.O. Smith Corporation to manufacture propellers for military aircraft. The Cattle Barn, 117,000 square feet, built to hold a thousand head, filled with machinery. The Horse Barn became a machine shop. Livestock, horse, and poultry shows were suspended. In 1944, the original wooden-domed Main Building burned down. In 1945 there was no fair at all. In 1946 there was no fair either. A polio epidemic closed the gates. That same year, crews converting the livestock buildings back to their original use found the Hippodrome unsound. The indoor arena, dedicated by James J. Hill in 1906, had been ruined by its years as a propeller plant. It was later razed. Then 1947. Livestock and poultry shows came back. Horses returned to the Horse Barn. And a vendor started selling a hot dog dipped in batter, deep-fried, and handed over on a stick. The Pronto Pup. The first food on a stick the fairgrounds ever saw. More than 324,000 people came through the gates that year. CONCLUSION: From County Poor Farm to the Great Minnesota Get-Together: How the State Fair Grounds Came to Hold the Whole State Ramsey County ran this ground as a poor farm, taking care of the people it could not otherwise take care of. When the Agricultural Society went looking for a permanent home, that was the appeal. Land that belonged to neither city, so neither city had to lose. The almshouse where the county's poor had slept became the fair's first administration building. In 1906 Dan Patch paced his mile here in one fifty-five, and the crowds he drew built the grandstand that is still standing. In 1943 the livestock barns went over to the war and turned out aircraft propellers. When the fair came back, a vendor sold the first Pronto Pup. In 1949 the fair took its last dollar from the legislature and has not taken state money since. Over two million people came through in 2019 a record yet to be broken. Only Texas draws more in a year, and Texas runs twice as long. Day for day, nothing in America draws a crowd like this one. This ground took care of a county's poor. It settled a quarrel between two cities. Now it holds the whole state for twelve days at the end of summer. Yesterday, they walked down Dan Patch Avenue to the gates and closed out the 2026 Minnesota State Fair. I think they named it right. The Great Minnesota Get-Together.