Prior to white settlement, Goodhue County was home to the Dakota people until they signed a treaty to cede their lands to the US government. The sale took time until the government decided where to set up a reservation for the displaced Dakota. By the time the sale went through in 1853, white settlers had already begun to move into native lands. Even after, Dakota people still left their new reservation and traveled their old hunting grounds in Goodhue County. Consequently, there was still interaction between the white settlers and the native Dakota. Hans Mattson, an 1853 Swedish settler in  what would become a town just north of the Kenyon quadrangle, describes his positive experiences with the native peoples that involved sharing food and smoking the peace pipe together.

After the establishment of the Minnesota Territory in 1849, many white American and Scandinavian settlers began to pour into Goodhue County. The county’s establishment, along with that of several of its neighbors, was unceremoniously prompted by the earliest American settlers entering the land and claiming it for their own before it was surveyed and listed for sale by the government. They prematurely divided up the land themselves, and the original county lines reflected the boundaries of these claims until the official government survey took place in 1854. That was the year of the first public land survey of Kenyon, or “Township 109”. In this early period, there were no official roads to connect people and settlement centers were few and far between. Early settlers followed “Indian trails” to find places suitable for farming, though I have found no record of these. The lack of roads and long distances from settlements complicated necessary tasks, like transporting mail. The nearest post office was in the city of Red Wing. Journeys there took days and the conditions could make them dangerous. For example, in his book Goodhue County: A Narrative History, Frederick L. Johnson describes an 1853 party of Swedish settlers to Vasa. He recounts the near deaths of two of the men who were caught in a blizzard “when they became lost during a trip to town.”

By virtue of the lack of roads, movement through the landscape in 1854 did not need to follow structured paths. People moved through the space in the easiest ways possible, such as along rivers. Consequently, it was possible for people to experience every part of the landscape, from the terrain to the weather, as every element was a necessary consideration before undertaking travel. Because of this difficulty to travel, the immediate area that people experienced every day likely did not extend beyond the legally allotted 160-acre claims.

The first official land survey, upon which this map is based, contains no property claims because, at least in theory, the first survey had to precede the first settlement. The farms shown are, therefore, the prominent farms recorded in the 1874 survey, which likely represent the most desirable places to farm in the quadrangle. It is inferred that farmers may have farmed these areas since the first white settlement in the area.