The time had come for Cass County, Minnesota to organize and become a real county.
Cass County was created on September 1, 1851 by the legislature of the Minnesota Territory. It was not formally organized until 1897. Cass County was formed from portions of Dakota, Mahkatah, Pembina and Wahnata Counties. The county was named in honor of Lewis Cass. In turn, before formal organization, land from Cass County was split off to form other of the surrounding counties.
Source: Online at Wikipedia – Cass County, Minnesota
The Cass County Government website has a nice history of Cass County Government. It didn’t have officers till 1872 and the boundaries where sliced off over the years by other counties – see the above timeline. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cass_County,_Minnesota
The book: “Cass County Heritage,” by the Cass County Historical Society, 1999 has several pages of the history of the county, Chapter III, page 15 to 23, and goes into more depth. This book can be located by using WorldCat to find it in several libraries. I tried to find it at the Minnesota Historical Society but was not getting a hit. They usually have these types of books in their reading room.
In Chapter III, they describe the organization of Cass County and Crow Wing County’s maneuvering to take more land from Cass before it did finally become a county.
Cass remained part of Crow Wing until the re-organization in 1897. In 1897 Walker was made the county seat but before that it was West Brainerd where you went to do business.
Like all political events the organization of Cass County, Minnesota in 1897 was of great interest to the inhabitants, businessmen and more. My great-grandfather George Angus Barclay was against the organization of the county and wrote several articles for the newspaper which I will feature in the next post. Here the Weekly Journal makes a comment about the 2nd letter.