Tamarack House: Joseph Brown and the Birth of a County
Near Stillwater, Minnesota
In eighteen thirty-nine, when this area was still part of Wisconsin Territory, a man named Joseph R. Brown built a house here in this valley and called the settlement Dahcotah. Brown was a trader, a politician, and a relentless frontier entrepreneur.
The very next year, as a member of the Wisconsin Territorial Legislature, he helped win the creation of St. Croix County, a county that reached into what would become Minnesota. His Tamarack House sat at the center of a small but ambitious community.
Brown would go on to play a complicated role in Dakota relations, eventually designing an early steam-powered wagon. The house is long gone, but the site marks an early act of American political organization in the Minnesota country.
