To my surprise, ghost towns were a recurring theme of our multi-year trips along the Great River Road. More than once we saw small exhibits dedicated to towns that had grown up to support the fur trade, the logging industry, or mining and withered away because industries closed, transportation routes changed, or county seats shifted. A chilling reminder of the impermanence of the things we build.

On our most recent trip, in and around the Twin Cities,  we were introduced to a new type of lost town, courtesy of a historical marker.  Founded in 1856 on the banks of the Mississippi, Nininger Minnesota did not grow organically around an industry. The town’s founders, John Nininger, and Ignatius Donnelly moved to Minnesota with the plan of building a new city as a contender for Minnesota’s capital. It was not an implausible goal at a time when Minnesota’s cities were just taking shape.

In order to create the appearance of a boom town, Donnelly purchased 100 of the 3,800 platted lots and advertised the benefits of the new community in newspapers and immigrant neighborhoods throughout the Eastern United States.

By 1857, the new town, with seventy buildings and a population of some 1,000, was a bustling river port.[1] It had everything you would expect in a river port at a time when lumber was booming: two sawmills, a grist mill, several factories, two boarding houses, six saloons, and a dance hall, not to mention a baseball team. The developers had aspirations to be more than just a successful port. They had plans for a public library, a debate hall, and an athenaeum–which in my mind is a combination of a public library and a debate hall, but I am not an urban developer with big dreams.

Those dreams crumbled in the Panic of 1857.[2] By 1869, Nininger City existed largely on paper, though Donnelly’s two-story mansion remained, overlooking the failed city from a hill on river. By 1932, there was nothing left except Donnelly’s mansion and the foundations of a few old buildings, hidden in the prairie grass.

Donnelly lived in his mansion until his death in 1901: one of those larger-than-life enthusiasts (aka eccentrics) whom the nineteenth century produced with some regularity. After Minnesota became a state in 1858, he served three terms as a congressman and one as its lieutenant-governor. He wrote the best-selling Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882)[3] , which is credited with popularizing the idea of the lost civilization, and three books arguing that Francis Bacon wrote not only Shakespeare’s plays, but the works of Marlowe and Montaigne. He supported women’s suffrage and the Farmers’ Alliance, an agrarian movement which sought to improve economic conditions for farmers through political advocacy and the creation of cooperatives. He ran for vice-president on the tickets of two different populist parties. (Not at the same time.)

[1] By comparison, St. Paul, the capital, had a population of roughly 10,000. The population of Minnesota as a whole was about 85,000.

[2] Here’s the short version:

Grain prices dropped due to a combination of bumper crops and reduced demand from Europe due to the end of the Crimean War. Foreign trade imbalances led to a drain on the nation’s gold reserves and increased interest rates. Banks failed. The development of railroads had been a driver of the economic boom that preceded the panic. Now the collapse of credit halted their construction. Unemployment in the large cities of the Northeast and the Midwest soared.

The Panic of 1857 also widened the economic differences between the North and the South, The South, which was less industrialized than the North, did not suffer to the same extent. Low tariffs (ahem) protected its cotton trade with Europe, and sustained its overall economy.

[3] Still in print 140 years later. I can only dream.