Someone once told me that people who live near places others want to visit rarely take the time to go to these places. I am talking about Disneyland, and Dollywood, places like that. So, it is no wonder to me that I have been living here for about 4 1/2 years and have seen but never investigated the Larson Log Cabin on Main Street in Wanamingo. Well, I looked it up in a few different places and found some very interesting facts that I would like to share with you all.
The stories I found are about the same, with a few discrepancies.
It begins with a man called Lars E. Larson. Some say his son Edward was ailing, and some say it was Lars himself that moved from Chicago to the Wanamingo area for his own health. In either case, Mr. Larson travelled to Wanamingo, which was inhabited mainly by Norwegians who had immigrated here from Norway to seek a brighter future. My family was among these travelers, which sparks my interest in the history of this town. But I digress.
So, Lars Larson moved to this area and built the cabin we are talking about in about 1856. He built the cabin in Section 22, presumably in Old Wanamingo, the site which is about 1 mile from where the town is now. The history books hint to the fact that the town moved to be closer to the railroad that was being constructed between Red Wing and Faribault. He thought the fresh air that he would be breathing as a farmer would improve his health. Shortly after he moved here, his 14-year-old daughter Anna joined him to help care for him, but within a year of her arrival, Lars died. Again I lost the trail of the family, but I am assuming that after Lars died, Anna moved back to Chicago, leaving the cabin behind. It is not known whether anyone else inhabited the cabin in the years to come.
That same year Anna , now 15, met her Sunday School teacher, Horatio Spafford. He was 29 and a successful Chicago lawyer. They were married in 1861. In the 10 years that followed, they had 4 daughters. Here is where it gets a little confusing. Anna and her girls were travelling by ship to somewhere not listed in my search and met with tragedy when the boat they were on, called the Ville du Haure collided with an English sailing ship on its way to Europe in 1873. Anna survived by hanging on to a floating piece of the wreckage, but her daughters were lost at sea. Horatio had remained at home with his business while Anna and her daughters were travelling and received this tragic cable from her .....Saved Alone.
During his voyage to be with his grieving wife, Horatio wrote the words to the song now displayed outside the cabin that was moved to town, It Is Well With My Soul. Three years later, Phillip Bliss wrote the music for the words that comforted a heartbroken father. This song is now displayed at the cabin in a handmade plexiglass case outside of the cabin that Lars Larson built, long before his granddaughters were drowned at sea.
The cabin was moved from its building site to its current location in 1974 as a true memorial to all community pioneers. The people of Wanamingo made the cabin solid after years of wear, and now keep it up by the goodness of the volunteers in town. And what happened to Anna and Horatio? They lost almost all of their assets in the Great Chicago Fire, and moved to Jerusalem and started the Jerusalem Colony, which began as an orphanage and today is a hotel. They had a son, Horatio Spafford Jr. but he died by the age of 4. They also had a daughter, Bertha Spafford, and some of her descendants are still involved with the hotel.
I would like to thank LaRae Heimerl for contacting me with a little more info on the log cabin. She said, "I was around 9 years old when my mother Laura Perrett was a member of the Goodhue County Historical Society in 1976, when we celebrated our country's bicentennial. Our neighbors were tearing down their old house to build a new house around 1974. That's when they discovered the kitchen of the old house was actually the single room log cabin, and a previous owner had just built around it to make the house larger over the years. Because of this discovery, a plan was made and fundraising began to disassemble the cabin, marking each piece, and reconstruct it next to the water tower where it is today." Well, the water tower may be gone, but the log cabin remains to remind us of our pioneering ancestors who started the town we live in today!
So, there you have it, as best as I could find the facts. As in most historical pieces, there are always more than one version of the facts, so I am not saying this is the gospel truth, but a fun dive into a historical piece of our town!
