Sacred Heart Public School

This settlement of sturdy Scandinavians, while the beginning of the influx of the substantial people of that nationality to the western part of Renville county, was not the first settlement in Sacred Heart. People had been here before the Massacre. 1 he famous Major Joseph R. Brown stone house had been built about 1860. In 1865, before the Scandinavian colony arrived. G. P. Greene had settled in the township. Mr. Greene was a prominent man in the township. He was the first postmaster of Minnesota Crossing, so called from the ford below his house. The mail was brought by a carrier from Vicksburg until 1876.

Passage source: The History of Renville County, Minnesota, published 1916.

Two stories are told of the naming of Sacred Heart. One story concerns Charles Patterson, who settled in Flora township, on the Renville county side of the rapids in the Minnesota river, in 17S3, and there established a trading post. He wore a peculiar shaped hat, made of fur. and the Indians began to call him the man with the strange or mysterious or magic hat. Their word "wakan," really meaning "spirit," being applied to anything that they did not quite comprehend or that was unusual in any way. Each particular clan of Indians had some animal which they never killed and which they regarded as sacred. It has been said that the Indians then living in this locality esteemed the bear sacred and that Patterson's hat was made of the fur from a great bear which had frequented the neighborhood.

Passage source: The History of Renville County, Minnesota, published 1916.

Machine-read from a century-old scan, so expect the errors a machine makes: misspelled names, dropped words, stray characters.

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