Barnesville, Minnesota

Barnesville, Minnesota was planted in eighteen seventy-four by George S. Barnes, a wheat merchant and large-scale farmer who saw opportunity in the arriving railroad. The Northern Pacific pushed into Clay County that same decade, and Barnes moved quickly to establish a station and townsite that would carry his name.

Norwegian immigrants were pouring into Clay County at that moment. The railroad put Barnesville on the map as a regional rail town. The city was incorporated in eighteen eighty-one and received its full city charter in eighteen eighty-nine.

A post office had opened in eighteen seventy seven, and Interstate Ninety Four now runs right past town, along with Minnesota Highways Nine and Thirty Four. Barnesville sits at one thousand thirty feet of elevation in the Fargo Moorhead metro area, and its population grew from two thousand one hundred seventy three in the year two thousand to two thousand seven hundred fifty nine in twenty twenty. Today Barnesville is best known for hosting the Minnesota Potato Days festival, a celebration of the Red River Valley's other great agricultural commodity, the humble potato, a staple of the valley's fields.

Potato Days, held every August, draws about fourteen thousand people.