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Dr. Xavier Holt, founder of Terra Nova. |
Fully prepared and with their supplies and logistics in order, Terra Nova and their families secretly struck out and mobilized as a wagon train just as the Blue Earth townspeople were celebrating Easter Sunday services on the morning of April 13, 1874, numbering one hundred people, which was nearly ten percent of the town’s total population at that time.
The Easter Exodus, as it came to be known, came as a blindside to the townspeople of Blue Earth initially, but it was not long before they learned of the crusade that motivated their migration, and soon feelings of hostility replaced the shock of the moment, with many influential people considering Terra Nova to be deserters and blasphemers, and quite possibly traitors worthy of persecution.
Holt’s settlers comprised some notable minds, craftsmen and artisans of Blue Earth and their families. They set up a main square and encampment, with a dozen or so men forming the first Fallholt Sheriff’s Department, and incorporating as the Township of Fallholt after approval from the State of Minnesota on October 31, 1874, and a U.S. Post Office was commissioned in March of 1875. Originally planned to be named Terra Nova, the name Fallholt was ultimately chosen because it was a beautiful autumn at the time of the founding and the group was insistent that Holt himself be represented in the name of the town.
As the main square took shape, the Township of Fallholt had its initial growing pains– several heated clashes with Blue Earth loyalists who resented Terra Nova resulted in a foiled kidnapping attempt against Holt himself and others, and more than a handful of drunken brawls and even stabbings between the town’s residents. Among its own, however, Holt’s people were fiercely loyal to one another, and they had to be since in many ways, they were very much on an island.
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Gellar Svensson, Founder of Svensson Farm |
A big part of Fallholt’s production was borne of the uniquely fertile soils, growing mainly wheat but also corn. Several of Fallholt’s original settlers were farmers, including a well educated and wealthy Scandinavian-born immigrant named Gellar Svensson. Svensson had purchased a plot from Dr. Holt in the new township of 320 acres in the southwest part of town, well watered, and perfect for growing corn. The son of a wealthy politician in his native Sweden, Gellar was a young, successful and innovative farmer by trade, but a socialite and adventurer in his heart. He’d been in the United States for just a few months traveling for pleasure and found himself drawn to the cultured cities of St. Anthony, Minneapolis and Saint Paul, often traveling by rail and sometimes by steamboat.
The corn that came from Svensson’s farm was of the finest quality, and was widely sought after all over Minnesota, using his social contacts and friendships made in his Minnesota travels to further his own business trade in this way. Svensson was also very well known to treat his farmhands with the utmost respect and compensated them very well.
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Ta-Koda, a young Dakota leader whose band was invited to live in Fallholt. |
Gellar Svensson was a part of Fallholt’s five-member Town Council alongside Dr. Holt, printing press owner Thomas Hawkins, Professor Emeritus Erwin Wrolstad from Carleton College, and a Dakota man named Ta-Koda. Each of the five members had an equal vote in township business, with Holt as the ultimate decider in close matters.
Hawkins was a veteran journalist who was lured away from a job at from The Worthington Advance in southwestern Minnesota, and came to Terra Nova at Holt’s behest to set up a printing press and founded the town’s first newspaper: a monthly publication called The Fallholt Hawkeye, which aimed to be truly representative of the new township to truly set themselves apart from Blue Earth: progressive in politics, Protestant insofar as it cared to delve into religion, and focused on agriculture.
Erwin Wrolstad, a childhood friend and schoolmate of Dr. Holt, was one of Carleton College’s first mathematics professors when it opened its doors originally as Northfield College in 1866. He suffered an unfathomable string of personal tragedies in losing his wife and three daughters to tuberculosis between 1870 and 1872.
With Wrolstad growing dissatisfied with his post at Carleton and the theological direction of the institution as a whole coupled with the compounding misfortunes, he was convinced by Holt to consider becoming Principal of the township’s first Public Schools and would travel from Northfield to attend the meetings of Terra Nova, ultimately becoming Holt’s closest confidant.
