Trails to the Past

Minnesota

Wadena County

 

 

 

Trails to the Past would appreciate any genealogy information that you may have such as news items, wills, deaths, births, biographies etc. if you have any of these items they can be emailed to Marie Miller the state of Minnesota Adminstrator

 

Its county seat is Wadena. The county was formed in 1858 and organized in 1873.Wadena County was organized on February 21, 1873, at which time Wadena was chosen as the county seat.

Wadena county is composed of fifteen townships, first surveyed in 1863. Each township is 6 miles by 6 miles and contains 36 sections of land (with the exception of Bullard and Thomastown which have a slightly different configuration because their boundaries are aligned with the Leaf and Crow Wing Rivers, respectively). In 1857, a man named Augustus Aspinwall laid out a townsite in what is now Section 15, Thomastown township, at the junction of the Crow Wing and Partridge rivers, and named it Wadena. In 1872, when the railroad went through the area it ran about three miles south of this site and thus the town quickly withered away.

During that period there were five organized townships (Wadena, Aldrich, Thomastown, Leaf River and Wing River) and three county commissioners. The balance of the townships were organized between this time and 1899; the last two, Huntersville and Orton after being organized as one township in 1898, were split in 1899. As of 2010, there are six organized towns in the county: Wadena (the county seat), Verndale, Sebeka, Menahga, Aldrich, and Nimrod. Ghost towns, towns of the past or unorganized villages, included Kindred or Shell City, Oylen and Ferris, Central, Huntersville, Leaf River, and Blue Grass.

In the early days, before rural mail delivery was begun, there were many post offices in the county to serve people so they did not have to travel far to get their mail. These included Kindred or Shell City, Wing River, Leaf River, Taylor’s Landing, Nimrod, Hoptacong, Farnham, Lukens, Passaic, Hartshorn, Ouichee, Bullard, Oye and Oylen. At the present time there are post offices in Menahga, Sebeka, Wadena, Verndale, and Aldrich.

For the last part of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, there were two railroads in the county. The Northern Pacific main line running east to west through Wadena was built in 1872, while the Great Northern branch or "K" line which ran from Sauk Centre to Bemidji, via Sebeka and Menahga, was completed in 1891. The line from Park Rapids to Long Prairie was abandoned in 1984 while the rest was abandoned in the early 1970s with the northern section from Park Rapids to Cass Lake has since been converted to the Heartland Trail.

Cities
Aldrich
Menahga
Nimrod
Sebeka
Staples
Verndale
Wadena (county seat)
Unincorporated communities
Bluegrass
Huntersville
Oylen
Ghost towns
Leaf River
Shell City
Townships
Aldrich Township
Blueberry Township
Bullard Township
Huntersville Township
Leaf River Township
Lyons Township
Meadow Township
North Germany Township
Orton Township
Red Eye Township
Rockwood Township
Shell River Township
Thomastown Township
Wadena Township
Wing River Township

 

Adjacent counties
Hubbard County (north)
Cass County (east)
Todd County (south)
Otter Tail County (southwest)
Becker County (northwest)

 

 

Webspace for this site has been generously provided by Genealogy Village and Access Genealogy Thank You!

 

 

The information on Trails to the Past © Copyright   may be used in personal family history research, with source citation. The pages in entirety may not be duplicated for publication in any fashion without the permission of the owner. Commercial use of any material on this site is not permitted.  Please respect the wishes of those who have contributed their time and efforts to make this free site possible.~Thank you!