Stearns County, Minnesota: History
The Stearns County area was formerly occupied by numerous indigenous tribes, such as the Sioux (Dakota), Chippewa (Ojibwe) and Winnebago (Ho-chunk). The first large immigration was of German Catholics in the 1850s. Early arrivals also came from eastern states. The Wisconsin Territory was established by the federal government effective July 3, 1836, and existed until its eastern portion was granted statehood (as Wisconsin) in 1848.
The federal government set up the Minnesota Territory effective March 3, 1849. The newly organized territorial legislature created nine counties across the territory in October of that year. The original counties had portions partitioned off in 1851 to create Cass County and in 1853 to create Sibley, Pierce, and Nicollet counties. In 1855 parts of those counties were partitioned off to create Stearns County. It was to be named Stevens County for territorial governor Isaac Ingalls Stevens, who had conducted an expedition through the area in 1853, but due to a clerical error, the county was named Stearns for Charles Thomas Stearns, a member of the Territorial Council. (To compensate for this error the area two counties west was later named Stevens County.)
The February 20, 1855, act that created the county directed the naming of three county commissioners and specified St. Cloud as the county seat.
Writing in 1997, Jewish-American historian of America's religious architecture Marilyn J. Chiat commented, "Father Francis X. Pierz, a missionary to Indians in central Minnesota, published a series of articles in 1851 in German Catholic newspapers advocating Catholic settlement in central Minnesota. Large numbers of immigrants, mainly German, but also Slovenian and Polish, responded. Over 20 parishes were formed in what is now Stearns County, each centered on a church-oriented hamlet. As the farmers prospered, the small frame churches were replaced by more substantial buildings of brick or stone such as St. Mary, Help of Christians, a Gothic Revival stone structure built in 1873. Stearns County retains in its German character and is still home to one of the largest rural Catholic populations in Anglo-America."
Furthermore, according to Kathleen Neils Conzen, "Stearns County Germans early established daughter settlements at West Union in Todd County, Millerville in Douglas County, and Pierz in Morrison County, later flooded into North Dakota (where 'Stearns County German' remains a recognized ethnicity today), and in 1905 negotiated with the Canadian authorities to establish the St. Peter Colony in north-central Saskatchewan."
The first courthouse was put into service on July 12, 1864, and it remained in use until the present courthouse was dedicated in 1922. In 1913 a campaign was mounted to shift the county seat to Albany, due to its more central location. The effort was not successful.
Stearns County was also founded off of farmers' markets and crop trades, making it one of the top grossing crop producing counties in the state of Minnesota.