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.

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