A Minnesota ghost town, or a town that never was?

CATHY WURZER: I love abandoned old buildings and ghost towns. The stories they can tell. Our Producer Britt Aamodt has the story of a Minnesota town that is a ghost town or really more accurately a town that never was.

BRITT AAMODT: I think it's fascinating to go for a walk and stumble on the foundation of some long-forgotten building, maybe somebody's home or an old barn. I've actually found old medicine bottles and broken bits of crockery.

So for this week's Minnesota Now and then history tidbit, I wanted to take you to a ghost town. We're going back to December 1856 when Ignatius Loyola Donnelly began his campaign to get people to move to the wonderful town of Nininger in southern Minnesota. The thing is the town wasn't wonderful and it wasn't a town. It was an idea that Donnelly wanted to make a reality.

Here to tell us more is Matthew Carter. He is the executive director of the Dakota County Historical Society. Welcome to Minnesota Now, Matthew.

MATTHEW CARTER: Thank you for having me.

BRITT AAMODT: So first of all, that's quite a name, Ignatius Loyola Donnelly. Tell me where was he from and where did this idea for an Nininger come from?

MATTHEW CARTER: So Ignatius Donnelly is probably one of the most well-known Minnesotans at the time during his life when he was living in Minnesota. So he grew up and was born in Pennsylvania, 1831. He was able to train at a prestigious law firm in Philadelphia and work as a clerk.

And around this time in the 1850s, a lot of people were starting to look west. And it got hung up and caught up in the whole land boom excitement that was going on, and that led him to Minnesota.

And he had this idea that he wanted to create what he described as a utopian community. His goal was that he wanted to found a city that would be settled by sincere and honest, hardworking people. And based off of that, that's what he had in mind and what he had envisioned for those that he was going to try and promote to and bring into the community.

BRITT AAMODT: So I want to get into this idea of a land boom. Why was that happening here in the 1850s? Did it have anything to do with the Dakota land being wrested away by railroads and by these treaty agreements?

MATTHEW CARTER: Two treaties that were signed in 1851 really played a huge role in the settlement. And that was the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux, which was signed in July 1851. And then the month after August of 1851 was the Treaty of Mendota.

In between these two treaties, it basically ceded about 21 million acres of land that made up the present-day Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota region. And land speculators were able to come in and really try and have an opportunity to strike it rich. That was basically what opened up this settlement.

BRITT AAMODT: So the town was called Nininger. Where did that name come from?

MATTHEW CARTER: so John Nininger was a gentleman who had a name for, and we actually had I believe his great, great granddaughter about 15, probably maybe even 20 years ago come in, and she said that very few people around still pronounce it the right way. I pronounce it in Nininger, but it was supposed to be like "winning her." So it would be Nininger or Nininger.

But it was named for a gentleman named John Nininger. He'd married Katherine Kelker Ramsey who was the sister of Minnesota's first territorial Governor Alexander Ramsey. Nininger was acquainted with Ignatius Donnelly. And the two of them had this opportunity to basically start this community and this joint venture together. And so they started buying up land.

BRITT AAMODT: What did Donnelly do to actually get people to move out here and to buy into this idea of his utopian city?

MATTHEW CARTER: So Ignatius Donnelly was a pretty charismatic guy, captivating orator all across the country and even overseas. And so I think he used that to his advantage as he was going through. And one of the early things that he did is he created this pamphlet that he published. And he said it's got a great climate, the scenery is beautiful, and it's better than Illinois and Iowa.

BRITT AAMODT: So was he successful? Were people moving in? Was there a big boom in land sales in Nininger?

MATTHEW CARTER: Yeah, they were pretty successful. Population numbers were around 300, 400, 500, right around 1857. And it ended up going up to about almost 1,000 people at one point. So people were buying into it. They were moving there.

Nininger's connections to the Ramsey family, they could put the Ramsey name as basically landowners and say, Alexander Ramsey is buying land here. You need to follow him. So they were able to pull on those threads there and get people to be interested, and actually buy the land and start forming this community and building businesses.

BRITT AAMODT: And they could join a baseball team?

MATTHEW CARTER: Yeah. Donnelly promoted this baseball team that was in Nininger. Talked about how they were forming this team and they're playing these baseball games. They're looking forward to the upcoming match. And there's no actual record that they actually played the game of baseball. A lot of people are thinking that may have actually been a ploy to try and get people to settle there.

BRITT AAMODT: What happened to the town? How come we don't say Minneapolis Saint Paul in Nininger?

MATTHEW CARTER: There are combination of things that happened around that time. As you can imagine, Ignatius Donnelly really tried to push to bring a railroad track through and into Nininger.

And he actually had an opportunity to run from Saint Peter, which would have been present-day Mendota all the way to Nininger and have this track go through, which then they could have expanded further south or further north. But it ended up falling through. And at that point, if you didn't get a railroad, a lot of these small communities ended up dissolving and going away. They became ghost towns.

But also, there is the financial panic of 1857. And that didn't help matters either. Nininger and the speculators were purchasing the land cheap and they were trying to sell the land. And a lot of speculators were inflating prices.

With the collapse of one of the banks, it set off a domino effect. Happened on the east coast or at least out east and then started spreading west. And Minnesota was impacted. And banks were starting to close.

And these banks that they were offering money, one of the stipulations that Ignatius Donnelly had with. If you bought a lot, you would have to do at least $100 improvement on that lot in Nininger.

And these banks were no longer offering the funds to do that, so a lot of these people were not able to pay for that. So they had to move to different communities in Nininger that could have been moving just a few miles away to Hastings or a little bit further away and head up 20 miles north and go to Saint Paul. So just a combination of those things all played a role in that decline of Nininger.

BRITT AAMODT: But Donnelly lived there to the end of his life?

MATTHEW CARTER: He did. He built his house, and there's some postcards from the 1870s that were created as well as some pictures from the 1930s that showed it was a two story house. It was a nice-looking house. Rather large size. A nice wraparound porch on the front of the house along with a picket fence and a windmill in the yard. But he promoted this area and really lived in this area his entire life.

BRITT AAMODT: I have one question for you. Last one. Have you ever visited Nininger?

MATTHEW CARTER: Yeah. Actually, I've been there a few times. You probably don't see a whole lot of historic Nininger. There was a Donnelly Avenue that was renamed Ivanhoe Avenue. And you can, I believe, still go and visit the original Nininger town hall just outside Hastings a few miles south there called the Little Log Village. And they actually have the original Nininger town hall.

BRITT AAMODT: Well, thank you so much for introducing us to Nininger past and present.

CATHY WURZER: That was our Producer Britt Aamodt talking to Matthew Carter. Matthew is the executive director of the Dakota County Historical Society, which can be found online at dakotahistory.org. By the way, that Little Log Village, when it's open, it's open about once a year, it is fantastic. Check it out when you have an opportunity this coming spring or summer.