John N. Bensen House

St. Cloud township lies on the east side of the county, being bounded on the east by the Mississippi river. It has an area of about 19,000 acres. The soil is a rich dark loam, and very productive. The northwest portion of the town is watered by Sauk river, which flows in a northeasterly direction, and crossing the extreme southeast corner of Le Sauk empties into the Mississippi.

Passage source: History of Stearns County, Minnesota, published 1915.

In the earlier days the affairs of the township and the townsite v/ere so closely allied that it is at this date difficult to separate them. There was for a time not much outside the townsite to chronicle, yet it was in the township of St. Cloud that the first white child in Stearns county was born and that the first furrow was turned. John Becker came to St. Cloud, or to what afterwards came to be known as St. Cloud, October 7, 1851, to open up a farm for his cousin, Geo. L. Becker, of St. Paul, who afterwards was president of the first railroad built to St. Cloud. He broke about two hundred acres of land, selling to the Indians everything that was raised on the farm except what was consumed on the place. He occupied the Lowry house, to which he built an addition. In company with a man named Douglas he lived there, the two doing the housekeeping, until the spring of the following year, when Mr. Becker went to Ann Arbor, Mich., his former home, and June 1, 1852, married Merriam F. Barr, starting the same day for St. Cloud. It was while they lived on the Lowry place that their daughter, Ora Ella Becker, was born, February 24, 1854, the first white child in Stearns county. Charles Fillmore was the second. As there was no other means of crossing the Mississippi river, Mr. Becker brought a number of the settlers who followed in later years from the east to the west side in a wagon drawn by a yoke of oxen, afterwards running a ferry for two years. He took a claim where Waite Park is now located, and when he sold this in 1876 moved to the city. In 1879 his eldest daughter - there were two other children, Frank H. and Mary E. - was married to Geo. M. McLane, of Brown's Valley, and went there to live, that place being still her home. On account of Mrs. Becker's ill health Mr. and Mrs. Becker moved to Brown's Valley, where all their children were and where the mother died April 5, 1910. Mr. Becker is making his home there.

Passage source: History of Stearns County, Minnesota, published 1915.

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

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