clay county histories

Markus Krueger | Program Director  HCSCC

How do places get their names? Well, I suppose if enough people agree a place is called something, that’s its name. 

For instance, between the Center Avenue and 1st Avenue North bridges, there is a big concrete pillar poking out of the water on the Moorhead riverbank. This was once the footing for the old North Bridge, which we dismantled for scrap during WWII. Have you sat on it? According to my mother-in-law, Betty Jo Sorenson, the neighborhood kids who played on it in the in the 1960s called the pillar Octopus Rock. That name apparently faded from usage as those kids grew up, which is a shame. I propose all of us readers agree that this thing is called Octopus Rock. Maybe if we put up a sign it’ll be official. 

In the 1860s, the place that would be Moorhead was called “13 Mile Point” because it was 13 miles south of Georgetown. Georgetown was a warehouse for the Hudson’s Bay Company, a British fur trade corporation based in Winnipeg, which is a town Winnie the Pooh is named for. Georgetown was named for Sir George Simpson, the big-whig in charge of the Hudson’s Bay Company. In 1871, the Northern Pacific Railway named 13 Mile Point after William G. Moorhead, one of the big-whigs in their railroad company. Mr. Moorhead never actually visited his namesake city. If enough of us agree to it, we could rename this town Octopus Rock. 

Most people in this chunk of planet earth live in towns established by railroad companies in the late 1800s. These railroad guys made sure to name plenty of towns after themselves – Moorhead, Dilworth, Fargo, Felton, Casselton, Hillsboro, and a slew of others. Hawley was briefly called New Yeovil after several families from original Yeovil (England) tried to make it a magnet for English settlers, but that idea sputtered out and it was named for Thomas Hawley Canfield, the railroad guy in charge of naming towns. The Ulens, Kragneses, and Hitterdals were local farmers, and George S. Barnes was a merchant in a place that became Barnesville. The railroad guys named one town for Howard Glyndon, the pen name of Mrs. Laura Redden Searing, who was a deaf poet and journalist. A little farther east they named a town after John James Audubon, a man famous for painting birds. Audubon is home to Minnesota’s Largest Purple Martin House.       

I wrote in an earlier article that it was probably Moorhead’s early boy scouts who first called the hill at Bosshard’s Farm “Gooseberry Mound,” but I’m glad to be corrected. Local historian Carroll Engelhardt found an account of Concordia Students picnicking at “Gooseberry Mound”  and throwing each other off “Tarpeian Rock” in 1914, half a decade before Moorhead’s first boy scout troops formed. There are now two Tarpeian Rocks that I know of – a famous ridge on Rome’s Capitoline Hill overlooking the Forum ruins, and an apparently similar ridge named by college kids somewhere at Gooseberry Mound Park, in a city some call Octopus Rock, Minnesota.