Alexander Faribault: Fur Trader Who Founded a City

The house at the corner of Northeast First Avenue is the oldest surviving structure in Rice County, and the story behind it begins with a fur trader and a river.

Alexander Faribault, son of French-Canadian fur trader Jean Baptiste Faribault and his Dakota wife, first came to this part of Minnesota in eighteen twenty-six to operate a trading post for the American Fur Company. He moved the post and by around eighteen thirty-four had established it at the bend in the Straight River where the city now stands. The town that grew around his post was platted in eighteen fifty-five and took his name.

With proceeds from the fur trade, Faribault built this Greek Revival frame house in eighteen fifty-three, making it the first wood-frame house constructed in Rice County. For years it served as a community center, a chapel, a polling place, and a meeting hall. Faribault had helped negotiate the eighteen fifty-one Dakota land treaties that opened southern Minnesota to white settlement, a history that carries its own painful weight alongside his legacy as a city founder. The Rice County Historical Society now owns and interprets the house.