Category: Biography

Pavilions at Minnehaha, part 2

For many reasons, quite a few neighbors around Minnehaha Park absolutely hated the commerce that sprang up outside the park from the 1890s onwards.  All the commercial businesses were not equally hated. Everyone needed grocery stores near by, and James R. Hartzell was one who ran a grocery at 50th and Hiawatha. He was popular and respected. In many years he also ran the pony ride concession at the park.

But others running businesses near but outside the park had a harder time of it, with prominent citizens doing everything they could to run them out. This worked less well that one might think, though the ultimate result was that places designed to draw crowds and provide entertainments were closed down but neighborhood conveniences stayed.

The Hiawatha Confectionery in the summer of 1924. Apparently they sold everything from postcards to houses.  The place was at 4900 42d Ave. South in Minneapolis.  –from the urbancreek archives

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A panorama of Minnehaha Falls

At its beginning, photography required innovators. Clever problem solvers envisioned the next innovations and then invented the solutions that would make those innovations possible.

One of these was Chicago’s John Carbutt, who invented—among other things—the celluloid film that made motion pictures possible. Carbutt, of course, also photographed Minnehaha Falls on several occasions in the 1860s. Another Minnehaha photographer who was a prominent photographic inventor and who worked at the turn of the last century was another Chicagoan: George Raymond Lawrence perfected aerial photography. It was quite a feat. Airplanes had not yet been invented.

A man with an impressive mustache who is probably in his 30s.
George R. Lawrence, probably taken after he perfected his “flashlight photography” and learned to contain the smoke and sparks of the simultaneous chemical explosions he used to illuminated large crowd shots.

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The “Hermits” of Minnehaha Park, Part 3.

Storyteller or liar?  William Herrick–the Hermit of Minnehaha Park–was some of each.  And Herrick told such convincing, engaging tales that it’s hard to believe that his stories are not true, even 100 years after his death.

His artful storytelling included details that both impressed his audience and added verisimilitude. When he told the story of his Civil War career, he left out the part about never seeing combat. He was stationed in Kansas, there to build bridges and protect the mail trains. Instead he said (truthfully) that he was stationed “near the Blue Cut country where the famous Younger and James brothers held forth.” Except that he’d been mustered out and sent home before the first James gang robbery. Surely that detail is unimportant in the higher calling of telling a good story.

a picture of an older man wearing a hat. And a mustache
William W. Herrick in the early 1900s, when he was renowned as the Hermit of Minnehaha Falls. Stories painted him as a kindly if eccentric man who had lived a life of glorious adventure but now just wanted to quietly cultivate his garden.–from “Hermit of Minnehaha Falls” edited by Samuel A. Hatch

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Samuel Atherton Hatch

Samuel Atherton Hatch was (after Longfellow) the most important story-teller in the history of Minnehaha Falls, and pretty much no one has heard of him. He died in 1904, just a few months after the publication of his obscure little tract.

Even in the years before antibiotics and vaccinations, when most people had been to funerals for small children, being “cut down in the prime of life” was a cause for shocked remorse and sadness. Death was more prevalent, but it did not matter less.

Possibly Samuel A. Hatch, who died at age 25, was just as great a guy as his obituaries suggested.

a young man with a full jawline and sort of goofy hair.
Pictured here in 1903, Samuel A. Hatch was a senior at the University of Minnesota. –from ancestry.com on-line yearbooks.

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