Neighborhoods of Northfield - Northfield Colleges and the Cannon River

I think of neighborhoods simply -- houses and people in a given location.  In Northfield, when you add the history of the structures and the people who lived there to the narrative and throw in current technology, you have a college course on Digital History and Deep Mapping.  We no longer live in a simple world. 

I came across “A Deep Map of Northfield MN” created by a Carleton College student in 2023.  She walked her neighborhood close to Central Park, took photos of houses and things that caught her eye, commented, and added a digital map of her route.  She discovered a sidewalk poem from a Northfield “Sidewalk Poetry Project” (2011), building date plaques on many houses, brighter house colors than expected, and interesting architecture.  One house she liked had unusual stucco siding -- 613 Fourth St.  This happens to be the William W. Pye House (1905), the home of a notable Northfield attorney and bank president (1870-1965).  He designed the house himself in the English Tudor Revival style—with stucco siding.  She also noted the oldest house in the neighborhood (1868) – 219 Nevada St which sits next to the Wilcox House built about 1890, for F.J. Wilcox.  He worked at the First National Bank at the time of the 1876 James-Younger Gang bank raid.  This neighborhood is close to Central Park and Carleton College, making it part of both Neighborhoods of Northfield. 

Carleton College began as Northfield College in a structure built by John W. North in downtown Northfield. It was 1857 when North built the American Hotel, a deluxe stagecoach hotel and relay station but, didn’t operate it long.  North lost ownership of the hotel in the Panic of 1857.  It changed hands a few times before it became the first multipurpose building for Carleton College and opened to students for the 1867-1868 school year.  It remained in use as a women’s dorm after the first building on their new campus, north of first Street East on the East Side of the Cannon River, was ready for students in 1872.

In the meantime, a group of Lutheran Norwegian - American immigrants were meeting to organize a college of their own.  St. Olaf’s School was founded in 1874 and opened in 1875 in four former schoolhouses owned by Northfield that were located near downtown on Union and Third Streets.  The school remained at this location for four years before they built their first building on the top of a hill in Manitou Heights, moving the school to the West Side of the Cannon River. 

Two colleges on two sides of the Cannon River with beginnings in downtown Northfield. Let’s take a look at what their neighborhoods have become.