Just northwest of here, at the bottom of the hill, stood the home of Ignatius Donnelly, author, orator, politician, reformer, and prophet who was easily the best known Minnesotan of his time, both in the state and throughout the world.
Donnelly, a lawyer from Philadelphia, moved west to Minnesota and launched a national campaign to attract settlers to Nininger City, a promising village of more than 500 residents when it was laid out around 1856. After the town melted away during the panic and depression of 1857, Donnelly turned his astonishing energy to politics, serving one term as lieutenant governor and three terms in Congress. For nearly 40 years his restless search for fair and effective social and economic institutions led him to play a role in virtually every agrarian reform movement of the late nineteenth century.
In addition to his fiery campaigns on behalf of farmers and workers, Donnelly wrote several unconventional and widely read books of popular science, including Atlantis, The Great Cryptogram, Ragnarok and Caesar's Column, in which he predicted the collapse of American society in the year 1988.
Donnelly lived at his Nininger City home until his death on January 1, 1901. Despite efforts to save it, the house was dismantled in 1949.
seal of The Minnesota Historical Society, Instituted 1849
Erected by the Minnesota Historical Society
On November 3, 1981
The 150th Anniversary of Ignatius Donnelly's Birth
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