Northfield's Founder Had Ties to Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln is not among the U.S. presidents who have passed through Northfield at one time or another, as have Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Ford, Carter, Clinton and Obama. However, as the nation celebrates Presidents’ Day on Feb. 18 and waits to see if the movie “Lincoln” garners Academy Awards on Feb. 24, Northfield can reflect on its ties to one of our most revered presidents through the town’s founder, John North.

A native of New York, North had gone to that state’s first abolition convention in 1835 in Utica. He moved to St. Anthony in Minnesota in 1849 with his second wife, Ann Loomis North, opened a law office there and, as a member of the territorial legislature, North introduced a bill to found the University of Minnesota in 1851. In 1855, he organized the Minnesota Republicans in the parlor of his home, the same year he was founding the town of Northfield and establishing flour mills on the Cannon River. By 1856, his family was settled in Northfield and, in 1857, North was leader of the Republican wing at the Minnesota constitutional convention, supporting suffrage for women and blacks.

In 1860, North was Chairman of the Minnesota delegation to the Republican National Convention in Chicago. North wrote his father-in-law and financial backer Dr. George Loomis that “after the Convention was over, being on the committee to notify Mr. Lincoln of his nomination, I went to Springfield to see the next President…We had a pleasant call on Mr. Lincoln and his Lady, got supper---heard several speeches in the capitol--saw a most brilliant display of Fireworks” and then started back to Chicago by rail again at midnight with no sleeping cars.

North campaigned for Lincoln in Illinois and, after Lincoln’s election, North was invited by Lincoln to come to the inauguration. Hoping to press his case in Washington, D.C., for an appointment (he wanted to be Superintendent of Indian Affairs), North sold some railroad bonds to buy new clothes for the event. North wrote Dr. Loomis on Jan. 17, 1861, “If I can get my appointment, I shall be in a fair way to do well. But if I fail I shall be flat broke.” On March 23, having heard nothing, North wrote his father-in-law, “I suppose that all is lost, and that I am defeated.” This was followed by a second letter that day in which North said he had been appointed Surveyor General of Nevada territory, a region of the Washoe Mines that is “filling up faster than any spot on Earth.”

As the Norths prepared for their move, word came that Fort Sumter had been fired upon and President Lincoln was calling for the first volunteer soldiers of the Civil War. In 1862, when North’s surveyor position ended as the Nevada and California offices were consolidated, Lincoln named North to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court and judge of the District Court of Nevada Territory. In 1863, as in Minnesota, North was president of Nevada’s constitutional convention as they prepared for statehood.

When his federal judgeship ended, North moved his family to Santa Clara, California, and made plans to start a colony in Tennessee (he went on to found the towns of Riverside and Oleander, California, in 1870 and 1881).

It was in the spring of 1865, when the Norths were temporarily in Santa Clara, that word came of the terrible event at Ford’s Theatre on April 14. The Norths’ daughter Emma recalled in a 1924 magazine story: “In the midst of national rejoicing that the Rebellion was at last put down, I came in from school one day to find my mother lying upon a couch and sobbing. When she could speak, she told me that President Lincoln had been assassinated. The whole world seemed suddenly to turn dark.” In a letter that Ann North wrote to her parents back in New York she described the reaction in the town as word spread of Lincoln’s death: “Every house of loyal citizens is draped in mourning…all business has stood still…Strong men weep…Many so overcome with grief as to be obliged to take to their beds.”

John North’s final visit to Minnesota took place in 1883, when he visited Northfield and the University of Minnesota campus. Always true to the abolitionist cause of President Lincoln, he made one last speech at a reunion of abolitionists in his home state of New York. North died on Feb. 22, 1890, Washington’s birthday, and is buried in Riverside, California.