Holdingford, Minnesota
Holdingford is a city in Stearns County, Minnesota, United States. The population was 708 at the 2010 census. It calls itself "The Gateway to Lake Wobegon", the fictional central Minnesota town created by Garrison Keillor.
Holdingford is part of the St. Cloud Metropolitan Statistical Area.
History
Historian of U.S. religious architecture Marilyn J. Chiat wrote of early settlement in the region, "Father Francis X. Pierz, a missionary to Indians in central Minnesota, published a series of articles in 1851 in German Catholic newspapers advocating Catholic settlement in central Minnesota. Large numbers of immigrants, mainly German, but also Slovenian and Polish, responded. Over 20 parishes where formed in what is now Stearns County, each centered on a church-oriented hamlet. As the farmers prospered, the small frame churches were replaced by more substantial buildings of brick or stone... Stearns County retains in its German character and is still home to one of the largest rural Catholic populations in Anglo-America."Holdingford was platted in the 1870s by Randolph Holding on a site near a ford. A post office has been in operation at Holdingford since 1872. According to local historian Vincent Yzermans, the earliest settlers and founders of St. Mary's Church were Irish-Americans and Canadian Gaelic-speaking immigrants from Sight Point, Cape Mabou, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Holdingford was originally called the "Scotch Settlement." Its Scottish-Canadian pioneers include descendants of Clan Stewart, Clan MacArthur, Clan Campbell, Clan Kennedy, and Clan MacPherson.
In an interview with Reverend Alex D. MacDonald for the book Mabou Pioneers, one elderly Holdingford settler recalled, "As I look back, I can remember they were a jolly group of people, and when all their children were born, they made quite a gathering when they were all together at parties in their different homes, with singing of Scottish songs, violin music, and of course, dancing Scottish reels."
The Highland Scottish dancing at local ceilidhs was often "a source of scandal" to their German neighbors. Despite the later Germanisation and Polonisation of both parishes in Holdingford, Yzermans often heard the famous lines from the Canadian Boat Song quoted in later years by the descendants of the Holdingford Scottish-Americans who had stayed:
The Holdingford area was ethnically polarized between German- and Polish-Americans. Until assimilation lessened the mutual distrust, they attended different Catholic parishes and only rarely intermarried. The area remains a center of traditional German and Polish folk music and of the speaking in local homes of both Silesian Polish and "Stearns County German".
During the 1880s and '90s, a small farming colony of Slovaks and Rusyns migrated from the Austro-Hungarian Empire via Pennsylvania and settled on homesteads northeast of Holdingford. The immigrants were mainly Roman Catholics, or Byzantine Catholics from the Slovak Greek Catholic Church or the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church, but enough converted to the Russian Orthodox Church that, with the assistance of Fr. John Maliarevsky from St. Mary's Cathedral in Minneapolis, they built St. Mary's Russian Orthodox Church around 1897. In 1886, local converts to Protestantism under the influence of visiting theology student John Sabol founded the Slovak Congregational Church, locally called "the Country Church", which still stands across a country road from the former site of St. Mary's Orthodox Church.
In 1902, Bishop Tikhon, the future Patriarch of Moscow, traveled from Minneapolis to bless the first completed Orthodox Church. While still a seminarian, Vasily Basalyga, who later became the Head of the Japanese Orthodox Church, also served at St. Mary's Russian Orthodox Church in Holdingford as a Reader and schoolteacher. The parish altar lamp was a personal gift from Tsar Nicholas II.
During the 1920s and '30s, Russian Orthodox priests from Holdingford sometimes made missionary visits to Rusyn Americans living in a similar farming settlement in Browerville, Minnesota. They made some converts, but not many. The Divine Liturgy was still offered in the traditional Old Church Slavonic liturgical language and only in 1978 did the Orthodox Church in America, which supplied the Orthodox priests who still visited St. Mary's, switch to Elizabethan English. In August 1978, the 14th-century Wonder Working Icon of the Our Lady of Tikhvin was brought for veneration from Holy Trinity Cathedral in Chicago to St. Mary's Russian Orthodox Church in Holdingford by Archbishop John of Chicago and Minneapolis. As of 1985, Orthodox laity continued to attend services from the surrounding communities of Bowlus, Upsala, Browerville, and St. Cloud. During the late 1980s, the parish "metrical books" were transferred to the Cathedral in Minneapolis and the Church was closed. Chiat described the empty church as "a small white Gothic Revival building crowned with a tin onion dome, a rare sight on the edge of a cornfield in Minnesota." In 2002, a family with roots in the parish removed the bell from St. Mary's and donated it to Holy Myrrh Bearers Orthodox Church in St. Cloud.
The only priest who lies buried in St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church cemetery in Holdingford is H. William Wilkens. According to his 1914 obituaries, Wilkens was a member of the Belgian nobility from Namur and a former seminary professor in Galveston, Texas. After concerns about his health forced a transfer to the Roman Catholic Diocese of St. Cloud, he served at a series of local parishes. He also became well known locally as a highly intelligent German-language essayist on religious and philosophical topics and a regular contributor to Der Nordstern.
World War I
Like other Stearns County German- and Polish-American communities, the Holdingford area opposed American entry into the First World War, but produced many local recruits and draftees once America declared war on Imperial Germany in May 1917. In November 1917, the largely German-American parish of St. Mary's heard a "very impressive sermon" on American patriotism by Fr. Scheuer followed by the presentation of the parish's service flag, which bore 15 stars in honor of each of the young men from the parish who were serving in the United States military. America's Independence Day 1918 was the largest ever seen in Holdingford, beginning with a Requiem Mass at St. Hedwig's Church for the fallen soldiers of the Allied Armies, followed by a dinner served at noon by the women of the parish. Five Holdingford-area Doughboys lost their lives while serving in the American Expeditionary Forces : Private Nicholas Heinz, who died on 13 September 1918 from wounds received in the 2 September capture of a German machine gun nest near Vilcey-sur-Trey, for which he was posthumously awarded the Distinguished Service Cross; Ernest Roehrs, who died of influenza on September 29, 1918, at Camp Funston, Kansas; Gregor Hartung, killed in action in France in October 1918; John Elkanic, killed in action on 22 October 1918 and buried in the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery and Memorial; and Private Francis Feia, killed in action in the fall of 1918. Feia's parents received definitive word of his death only on 12 July 1919. A Tridentine Requiem Mass was offered for Feia at St Hedwig's Church on 21 July 1919. Holdingford's American Legion Post #211 was later named in his honor.Prohibition era
During Prohibition, Holdingford earned the title of "moonshine capital of Minnesota". According to historian Elaine Davis, this was because organized crime figures from the Twin Cities, Chicago, and Kansas City made frequent trips to the area to purchase Minnesota 13, a high-quality moonshine distilled locally by Polish- and German-American farmers with the collusion of corrupt local politicians and law enforcement.In October 1923, four Stearns County residents, including mobbed up County Commissioner Val Herman, were arrested by Federal Prohibition Enforcement Agents after an extremely violent car chase between the Pitzl Brewery in New Munich and Holdingford. The other suspects were Stanley Dobis of St. Anna and Albin Bohmer and Joseph Sigmeth of Avon, Minnesota. All were held in Minneapolis pending trial on federal charges of violating the Volstead Act.
According to Yzermans, during the Prohibition era, "a popular little ditty was being sung and hummed along the highways and byways of Holding Township":
In June 1933, Clarence Olson, alias Tuffy, a bootlegger and gangster based in Eagle Bend, Minnesota, who, according to The Long Prairie Leader, "has long had a reputation as a liquor runner and hijacker and who has been claimed by many to be the toughest man between Minneapolis and Duluth", met his destiny in a Holdingford area gunfight. After arriving with two associates at the farmhouse of Holdingford bootleggers Joseph and Anthony Dzierweczynski to buy 85 gallons of Minnesota 13, Olson first announced that the Dzierweczynskis would now be paid in cash. Then he and his enforcer Harley Buchan drew their sidearms and announced that they intended to take to 85 gallons of moonshine for free. Joseph Dzierweczynski fled and returned with a loaded shotgun. As he and Buchan ran to their escape vehicle, Olson received two fatal shotgun blasts in the back. After an investigation by the Stearns and Todd County Sheriff's Departments, Olson's two surviving enforcers and the Dzierweczynski brothers were arrested pending criminal charges.
According to the Long Prairie Leader, "Tuffy Olson has for years had a reputation of being a booze runner who has had many conflicts with the law. At the time of his death, a Federal charge of illegal possession of liquor was hanging over his head, the trial being scheduled for later in the year. It is alleged that he peddled liquor at dance halls over a wide area and other rumors credit him with having hijacked many liquor runners in this section of the State."