Wrapping up their Four Authors in Four Months series, the Clearwater Library welcomed Minnesota author Rhonda Fochs June 22. 

 

Fochs is the author of four Minnesota’s Lost Towns editions, Northern Edition I, which was published in 2014, Central Edition and Northern Edition II, which were published last year, and Southern Edition, which was released just a few weeks ago.

 

Fochs has personal connections to lost towns. Her grandparents homesteaded in a town in Montana that became a lost town, her aunt owned land in Wisconsin where an early 1900s logging town used to be located, and her mom used to tell her about a town that was once located near her home in Hackensack, MN. 

 

“I wish I’d listened better when I was young,” Fochs said. “All those stories are gone.”

 

With its wealth of natural resources, Minnesota has a number of lost towns, places that used to have human settlement that have been abandoned for one reason or another. Most of these towns grew because of one resource, and once that resource was depleted industry moved on, and with it, the town’s residents.  

 

Fochs’ fascination with lost towns grew and she decided to start researching them. In order to do so, she first had to have a definition of what a lost town was, and the local historical societies she called looking for lost towns didn’t always know.

 

One person she spoke with called them “poke and plumb” towns, little bitty towns that by the time you “poke” your head out you’re “plumb” out of town. The definition she eventually settled on was “a once thriving town that has completely, or nearly completely, disappeared.”

 

She had a number of criteria for a town to be considered lost, for example, they had to have once been thriving and active, had a commercial district and post office, and they truly no longer exist today as a town.

 

Lost towns are classified by what’s left today, from Class A, where there is no trace of the town left at all, to Class G, where the town was joined or absorbed by a neighboring city.

 

Fochs discovered there are two types of lost towns. The first are mainly located in Northern MN, and are the “boom and bust” towns, and the second are towns that grew over time and gradually faded away. 

 

There are numerous reasons towns were abandoned. For many, there was a depletion of natural resources, as was the case with towns involved in logging and mining. Others were bypassed by the railroad or there was changing community status, such as losing the county seat designation. Disasters like the Hinckley Fire in 1894, or wars, such as the Civil War or the Dakota Conflict, when people moved to larger towns for safety, also contributed to lost towns.

 

Fochs briefly shared stories about some of the lost towns around Minnesota and the colorful characters that lived in them before focusing on lost towns in Wright County, including French Lake, which was along the Territorial Road from Monticello to Forest City, Fremont, which was near Clearwater on I-94, and Enfield, which was located two miles south of Hasty, another lost town.

 

In the audience was Gary Stolp, whose mother, Eveleth Stolp, used to own the Hasty Inn. Stolp and his wife, Marge, who also attended the presentation, shared with the crowd that they had held their wedding dance at the inn, which had converted its second floor to a dance hall. 

 

“I think someday people will be reading about these towns, so by doing this I’m saving them,” said Fochs. “There’s such great stories in them.”

 

Minnesota’s Lost Towns books are available on Amazon or can be ordered directly from Fochs’ website at http://rhondafochs.weebly.com. They can also be borrowed through area libraries.