Glencoe Fort: A Town That Armed Itself in the Dakota War

Glencoe was barely seven years old when the Dakota War of eighteen sixty-two swept across southern Minnesota. Laid out in eighteen fifty-five, it had just become the county seat of McLeod County when word arrived that Dakota warriors had attacked settlements to the west. The townspeople panicked and fortified.

At the peak of the crisis, troops were stationed here, and the fort they improvised held many settlers who had fled their homesteads. The war ended with the largest mass execution in United States history at Mankato that December. Glencoe survived, though the violence reshaped the entire region.