As some of you know, I'm the cubmaster of our local pack. I established a little website to keep our families up to date on pack events. (www.pack490mn.com) Every once in a while I'll run some type of little contest, just to keep folks checking the site. Right now the contest involves identifying a picture of a guy and guessing who he is. The guy I picked was Silas Wright, who our county is named after (just for the heck of it)
Well, after finding his picture, I started to read his biographies from different sources, and for the life of me I couldn't figure out why a MN county was named for him. The guy was never a resident of MN; as far as I can tell he may have never even visited MN. He was a prominent politician from New York in the 1820-40's.
I finally stumbled onto a site that provided the answer. It has all of MN counties and what their names are referring to. ORIGIN OF MINNESOTA COUNTY NAMES
Turns out Silas had a buddy of his who was from Monticello MN; this bozo pushed through naming the county after his pal. What were these people thinking. It was an idiotic decision; so I assume they were the liberals of their day that voted for it.
I also stumbled on to this interesting bit of trivia: Wright county population by ethnicity
German - 37%· Norwegian - 12%· Irish - 9%· Swedish - 9%· Polish - 4%· French (except Basque) - 4%· English - 4%· Finnish - 3%· Czech - 1%· Dutch - 1%· French Canadian - 1%· Danish - 1%· Italian - 1%· Scandinavian - 1%· Scottish - 1%· Mexican - 1%
I'm gonna have to send a letter to the 'Motherland' and tell them to send more Poles to Wright County. (not Poland---Hamtramck Michigan, birthplace of the king)
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2 comments:
Pack490 can use some feminine touch as the colors are quite distinguishing:o)
Hey: they're cub scout colors. I started that site without knowing an absolute thing about web sites. If I started it again today, I'd probably do it differently. As a matter of fact, with my current knowledge of blogspot, and the easier beta version, I may stop paying yahoo geocities and save a few bucks a month for the pack.
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