Montevideo: Named for Uruguay by a Civil War Veteran

Montevideo sits where the Chippewa River joins the Minnesota River, and it carries a name that belongs to a South American capital, not a Minnesota prairie town. The city was platted on May twenty-fifth, eighteen seventy, by a Civil War veteran named Cornelius J. Nelson, who had come to the river confluence from New York.

Standing on the bluffs above the two rivers, Nelson saw a view that reminded him of the hills above Montevideo, Uruguay, the capital's name meaning roughly from the mountain I see. He proposed the name, and it stuck. The county seat of Chippewa County had been at Chippewa City, on the opposite bank, until Montevideo men took the county records across the river and the state later made the move legal.

Today Montevideo is the commercial center for a broad stretch of west-central Minnesota, a city of about five thousand on the Minnesota River Valley Scenic Byway, still carrying the romantic name a homesick New Yorker gave it in eighteen seventy.