Osseo, Minnesota

Osseo is one of Hennepin County's oldest communities, with roots stretching back to eighteen fifty-two when Pierre Bottineau, a Metis fur-trade scout and guide, settled on what was called Bottineau Prairie. Bottineau, who lived from eighteen seventeen to eighteen ninety-five, was a surveyor, guide, and fur trader, and he established the Catholic church in Osseo. The settlement went by the name Palestine before being renamed Osseo in eighteen fifty-six.

That year part of the town was platted as Osseo and another part as the City of Attraction. The name is Ojibwe, taken from a figure in Longfellow's poem Hiawatha, meaning Son of the Evening Star. The Ojibwe word is Waaseyaa.

When Osseo was incorporated by the Minnesota legislature in eighteen seventy-five, the community was small, with about two hundred residents by the next census. The town was small enough that its official boundary split awkwardly across two townships, Brooklyn and Maple Grove, and both governed it simultaneously for a time. Today Osseo is almost entirely surrounded by suburban development, but the historic downtown grid and its old main street buildings preserve the skeleton of what was once a genuine rural crossroads village on the edge of the Twin Cities.

Osseo stayed a village until nineteen seventy-two, when it became a statutory city. Just under twenty-seven hundred people live there now, and every Labor Day weekend the Osseo Lions Club puts on a fair and parade called Lions Roar.