Lost Town of Brush Prairie

 

Bergen Township Lost Towns: The Lost Town of Brush  Prairie…

Founded:  1856

Location:  Three miles south of  Lester Prairie.      

         One of the early settlements in what is now Bergen Township, McLeod County, was the settlement of Brush Prairie. Brush Prairie was started by Swedish and Norwegian settlers Gundar Halvorson and Jonas Burtman who came to the township in 1856.  Gundar Halverson was the first to arrive. He was born in Norway in 1799.  He came to the new world by way of Canada. In 1854 Gundar traveled to Carver where he was a farm laborer for two years. In 1856, in the company of three others, he bought a McCormick wagon, a team of oxen and other equipment and came to Glencoe where a few settlers were living. After hearing of an area called Brush Prairie, he traveled to the area and built a small shack and a dugout.  Homestead rights were secured by filing a claim. One deed was signed by Abraham Lincoln and the second deed was signed by Ulysses S. Grant. Later Gundar’s parents, Halvor and Dorothea, and his brothers and sister joined Gundar at Brush Prairie. Halverson’s still live on the farmland homesteaded by Gundar Halvorson.  Jonas Burtman was born in Smaalland, Sweden in 1837. In 1853 at the age of 16, Jonas immigrated to America on a three-mast sailboat, a trip that took 35 days. He worked on the railroad in Illinois for a year but hearing of a Scandinavian Community in Carver, somehow he found his way to Brush Prairie, another Scandinavian community.   He survived by digging ginseng, drying slippery elm, and trading the ginseng and elm for necessities at Carver and Chaska. His brother, John Burtman joined him at Brush Prairie.   John Burtman helped start the Swedish Lutheran Church in Brush Prairie, in 1870. The church was built on land donated by John Burtman in 1873 and had 22 charter members.  For some reason many Swedes left the area and by 1906 there were not enough Swedes in the area to keep the church afloat and the congregation was dissolved. 

In the 1850s and 1860s many Norwegians came to Brush Prairie area and settled. Feeling a need for a church, the settlers first met in homes and by 1859 the settlers formed a religious corporation and started a church, Bergen Norsk Evangelical Lutheran Church. In 1875 the church bought an additional 10 acres and a parsonage was built. In 1887 a church school was built as well as a barn and a granary. In 1896 a fire burned the church. A new church was built at a different location down the road and a new cemetery was started. Now we see why there are two cemeteries located so close together.  The same church buried their members at two different locations.  Brush Prairie Settlement consisted of a general store, where the first Post Office in  Bergen Township was located, a blacksmith shop, a school, churches, a town hall and a baseball field.