BRAINERD — Jeremy Jackson just can’t resist a history mystery, especially when it involves his hometown.
The former Brainerd man spent hours this spring deciphering 140-year-old handwritten city council meeting minutes in search of evidence he hoped he wouldn’t find.
“I independently started working on this, but then I quickly called Mayor (Dave) Badeaux and told him I wanted to do this,” Jackson said during an interview aired on the Friday, June 9, KAXE Morning Show. “And together we agreed, we were gonna uncover this. Regardless of the outcome, we were gonna determine, was this fact? Or was this a fable or something? … We wanted to know: Was it real or not?”
Jackson’s inquiry began shortly after Brainerd city officials renamed its newest park after the man once known as the “Father of Brainerd,” Lyman P. White. White moved to Brainerd in 1870, becoming one of the first permanent residents of the city before eventually serving as the city’s second mayor, on the school board and leading the county’s agricultural committee.
But an allegation about White found online stirred controversy over the park’s name. White’s “Find A Grave” memorial site featured a book passage claiming the mayor oversaw a problematic ordinance. According to The History of the Upper Mississippi River Valley, Indians found within city limits after dark in Brainerd were locked up in a building prepared for that purpose.
“‘And the people were freed from the night prowlings and hideous whoops that would have otherwise disturbed their slumbers,’” Jackson said, reciting the 1881 text published while White was alive.
This biographical detail was repeated in aBrainerd Dispatchstory about White published in 2022, and it was the basis of outcry asking the city to change course on the riverside park’s name.
"Regardless of the outcome, we were gonna determine, was this fact? Or was this a fable or something? … We wanted to know: Was it real or not?”Jeremy Jackson
City officials, meanwhile, pointed to a long-ago promise made to White’s son, who donated the land on the condition a park on the property be named after his father in perpetuity. The original tourist park, similar to a modern-day campground, bore White’s name a century ago.
But eventually, the city-owned property became a parking lot below Mississippi Terrace, a high-rise apartment building in Brainerd. Plans to redevelop the property into a park have been in the works for approximately the last decade and were supercharged in 2021 when the city received a $2.85 million grant from the state’s Environmental and Natural Resources Trust Fund.
Situated on a 3-acre parcel on the banks of the Mississippi River, the park’s intent is to bring residents and visitors closer to the waterway that birthed the city and shaped the nation. It features green space and river overlooks with trails, a community amphitheater, an outdoor classroom and steps down to the river.
There is also a canoe/kayak launch for use by the public, which echoes its historic use as a point of departure and arrival by river. Visitors can find two river overlooks, benches, a restroom building, playground and interpretive signs.
But the dark accusations about White threatened to overshadow the park’s completion and dedication as the city’s newest community space. Jackson, who’s spent years researching the early history of Brainerd and surrounding communities, began to dig.
“The real underlying issue here is if you really ponder it, you're talking about the potential of a city of Brainerd passing an ordinance where someone’s arrested for their ancestry or their color of their skin,” he said. “And for people that are proud of their hometown or grew up in Brainerd, that's a pretty big deal. And I think everyone wants to be proud of their hometown, and that would be pretty controversial if true.”
Jackson spent his free time in April reviewing digital archives of the Brainerd Tribune, a long-ago defunct newspaper that chronicled the city’s earliest years. The Tribune printed all City Council meeting minutes then. No reference to an ordinance of this nature could be found, however.
Jackson instead tracked down the original handwritten notes taken from the meetings — including all resolutions passed and lengthy purchase and expenditure lists — at the Minnesota Historical Society. In partnership with Badeaux and fellow local history buff Carl Faust, Jackson reviewed every page of minutes up through a year after the book making the claim was published.
“Some were pretty faint, but they were all legible, and the ones that were faint, we put into Photoshop,” Jackson said. “We ended up with about 300 pages of documentation.”
After careful review and consensus, the group found nothing to corroborate the claim about White. And Jackson said he breathed a sigh of relief.
“That’s the challenge of, you know, written history. It’s taken as fact,” Jackson said. “But the issue with the book is there’s no citations of where that source material came from.
“ … I personally reviewed those pages myself three times. … There is no mention of the word Indian or Chippewa or Ojibwe or any relation to American Indians within those meeting minutes anywhere.”
So why did this book printed so long ago inaccurately portray the Father of Brainerd and the city he helped to shape?
Jackson can only speculate. He said it’s possible some wayward Brainerd resident posted their own fake ordinance around town at the time. Or perhaps a mayor of a different city along the Mississippi River’s path made such a decree. Or wires may have crossed concerning another ordinance calling for the arrest of anyone in town for public drunkenness or disturbing the peace.
“The author of the book could have twisted the description of this ordinance into something it wasn't, with some poor choice of extra words,” Jackson wrote in a follow-up email. “The large population of inmates in Brainerd were typically ‘roughs’ associated with the railroad construction (jailed for) saloon fights, stabbings, shootings, etc.”
Asked whether it was possible that government officials unofficially endorsed a race-based practice — if not officially through ordinance — Jackson noted Brainerd of the 19th century was home to a transient population of railroad workers known for bad behavior. But it was also common for Ojibwe peoples from a number of tribes to visit Brainerd and trade goods such as blueberries, Jackson said, so the city featured a mix of original inhabitants as well.
“Brainerd was like ‘Hell on Wheels,’ and ‘Hell on Wheels’ was the Union Pacific as it built to the west,” Jackson said. “You have a crowd of rough people that worked on the railroad because they probably couldn’t work anywhere else. … They were probably largely uneducated and they liked to get drunk, fight, gamble. There was a red light district in Brainerd.
“Lyman P. White shut that down. I mean, he was really in the forefront of trying to make Brainerd a civilized town and get rid of all this abundance of occurrences that would make it a difficult place to raise a family or to settle.”
The “Find A Grave” memorial of White no longer includes reference to the claim Jackson has since proved to be false. And for Jackson, the restoration of White’s legacy as an influential figure in the city’s past was an important byproduct of solving a history mystery.
“Those that live in Brainerd, those that grew up in Brainerd, their hometown, they can rejoice that there was never an ordinance like this that targeted individuals because of their ancestry. That's first and foremost,” Jackson said. “Two, hopefully this allows this to die down. The city of Brainerd was obligated to continue the name for the family. If they weren't going to do that, then honestly, they're probably obligated to give the land back to descendants of Lyman P. White.”
Listen to the full interview with Jackson from the KAXE Morning Show above.
