These comments come from a Herman, Minnesota resident in 2011 when she nominated the Grant County Courthouse in Elbow Lake for recognition in MPR’s Celebrating Minnesota Architecture Series. I guess the woman’s temporal distance from the fraudulent event of the late 19th century allowed her to appreciate the beauty of the courthouse in spite of her residency in the wayward town.

The election for county seat, held in 1881, was acrimonious and civic leaders from Herman did indeed raid the county offices in Elbow Lake and cart off county records and iron safes. The election was eventually declared null and void when investigators discovered a sizable number of votes had not been counted in several townships and, in one, more votes were cast than there were eligible voters. It seemed temporary workers brought in from Anoka county had cast ballots before returning home and several minors as well as non-citizens (most immigrants at the time were from either Scandinavia or Germany) had also voted in one jurisdiction. Elbow Lake, barely a crossroads of buildings but conveniently located in the center of the county, received the nod to establish itself as the locus of county government.

Today the Grant county courthouse stands as one of the most beautiful interiors of the 89 county courthouses in Minnesota that I visited. Not that I can claim to have seen all of them. When I started this photography project it was the first year of the pandemic and I only took photos of the exterior of the buildings. But once I was able to get into more places, this courthouse in Grant County, built in 1905, immediately stood out. It’s not a large courthouse (the entire county numbered only about 9,000 residents at the 1900 census) but the people of the county wanted something outstanding to represent them and their, mostly, law-abiding population. The jewel in the crown is the rotunda dome with murals depicting agricultural scenes from this rural northwestern corner of the state.

Odin Oyen, a Norwegian immigrant who established a design firm in LaCrosse, Wisconsin after graduating from the Art Institute in Chicago, decorated the building with those stunning murals and other details that have been restored recently in keeping with the design esthetic of the time.

[Note from the photographer: Although I anticipated publishing this account earlier in the year, the current political turmoil targeting immigrants in our Minnesota communities has made it difficult to concentrate. Readers may be ready for a minor distraction at this point and a story that involves proven voter fraud hits home in a way that seems quaint, if a little raw, some 145 years later.]