Maple Grove, Minnesota

Maple Grove is now one of the largest suburbs in the Twin Cities, but its story begins in eighteen fifty-one with a fur-trade scout and a log cabin. Louis Gervais, a French-Canadian trader, staked one of the first homestead claims in what would become Hennepin County, building a cabin in the maple and oak groves that gave the community its name. His neighbor Pierre Bottineau, who would later anchor the settlement at nearby Osseo, also claimed land here.

Within just a few years, a church, a town hall, and a school followed. The Ho-Chunk people, also called the Winnebago, had lived in this territory before federal removal policies pushed them west. European settlers filtered in rapidly after Minnesota's Dakota treaties opened the region.

Maple Grove stayed rural farmland for more than a century, then transformed dramatically in the nineteen seventies and eighties as Interstate Nine Four extended the Twin Cities' commuter orbit. The population grew from about six thousand in nineteen seventy to more than seventy thousand by twenty twenty.