For many generations, Native people lived in this area along the banks of the upper Mississippi. Later, fur traders and Christian missionaries worked among the Indians. But as early as the 1830s, white settlers and soldiers from Fort Snelling "discovered" the rich stands of pines around Little Falls and began the extensive logging that forever changed the region.
As Minnesota's timber industry boomed in the last decades of the 1800s, so did Little Falls. Sawmills sprouted around the rapids that gave the town its name. Huge logjams often filled the river. Around 1900, the local economy centered on lumber and related industries. C. A. Lindbergh, who bought this property in 1898, was a lawyer who counted the Weyerhaeuser lumber company among his most important clients. His son, Charles, Jr., had strong memories of those days.
Lumber companies were cutting virgin timber in the north, and each summer the river was filled with logs on their way to sawmills. Great numbers of them would pile up against boulders in the rapids until jams formed all the way to shore.... The neighbor boys and I often went out on these jams to fish and swim, and stretched naked in the sun on the warm, barkless surface of some larger butt log.
Charles A. Lindbergh, The Spirit of St. Louis
[Photo captions] Clockwise from far left:
1923 plat maps showing the Little Falls area, with the Lindbergh property shown at the lower right of the largest map;
a logjam at Little Falls, about 1890;
downtown Little Falls, about 1890
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