These stories can also be heard on Sunday mornings around 10 am on WILD 102’s “Look Back in Time” program. Each week’s radio story will be posted here on our website.
Weekly radio stories are researched, compiled, and read by Sheila Winstead, RCHS Board Member.
September 8, 2024
Recently on a little adventure with my sisters Tallie and Jean, niece Erin and great-nephew Elias, we
stopped at the wooden lookout platform along highway 11 at the Twin Lakes Wildlife Management Area on
the eastern edge of Kittson County. The platform has been there for many years, and as often as I drive by
it, this was the first time I’ve stopped there. It was fun to look out over the wetlands below it and listen to
the birds chirping and see the wildflowers around it. There’s a sign posted there telling about nearly 30
birds to watch for and 9 different mammals that a person might see. That day, we were the only mammals
visible.
As our little traveling group continued driving east toward Greenbush, we drove past a small cemetery
south of the highway, the Pelan Cemetery. An article from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune published 40 years
ago on August 27, 1984, tells about the long-gone town of Pelan.
Nearly a century ago Hans T. Olson moved his log house a mile into the newly forming town of Pelan,
Minnesota. As the town developed, it gained two saloons, two stores, a hotel, church and school, and it
became a stagecoach stop, said Milt Sather, a historian from Greenbush, Minnesota.
Today Olson’s home still stands, but the town of Pelan, once populated by 200 people, has long since
vanished. And, as is the case with hundreds of other abandoned Minnesota towns, there are few clues that
Pelan ever existed. With a junkyard and two new houses surrounding what used to be the main street,
most people “don’t realize the town was there,” said Sather, who has read old Pelan newspapers and
interviewed children of former residents to learn about the town. Besides the Olson house, which now
shelters a car, two other buildings remain from the town.
Each family in Pelan donated a log to build a schoolhouse, and it still stands a few hundred yards from the
Olson house, Sather said. Another building, 8 by 8 feet, standing on what was the outskirts of town, was
probably the town jail, he said.
Like some other ghost towns, “It’s the railroad that caused the demise of Pelan,” Sather said. In the early
1900s the Soo Line railroad was built through Karlstad, southwest of Pelan, and about the same time the
Great Northern railroad was built to the east through Greenbush. Pelan was suddenly an inland city, with
no access to railroads, Sather said. “People began to get a little nervous.”
In 1905 a creamery that had been built just one year earlier was dismantled, and one of the saloons was
moved to Karlstad. Within the next few years a mill was moved to Karlstad, the town band was dissolved
and a law practice moved to Badger. In 1909 Pelan ceased to exist as an incorporated village, and
remaining businesses soon moved to Karlstad or Greenbush, Sather said.
Despite the lack of visible clues to Pelan’s past, Pelan Park, a mile from where the town stood, reminds
people how things used to be. The park, which includes the original Karlstad railroad depot, a blacksmith
shop, a trapper’s cabin, a re-created school house and the Pauli Lutheran Church, is not a replica of Pelan,
but shows how people lived in the late 19 th and early 20 th century, Sather said. Other northern Minnesota
ghost towns, like Bangor, Hector, Sparta and Adriatic, thrived because of iron mines, and died when the mines shut down.
Rainy Lake City and Winston City in Koochiching County are two of the towns that sprouted in the late
1800s when there was thought to be gold in northern Minnesota, but 10 years later they died. Roger Barr,
who researched ghost towns for the Minnesota Historical Society, said he heard estimates that there are
1,500 ghost towns in Minnesota, but “You can double that number and feel safe.”
If the original function for a town disappeared, whether it was mining, mills or logging, the town itself
disappeared. Barr said.
Some railroad companies would deliberately miss some towns so they could build up new towns and make
more money, said Barr, who edits magazines for the International Trade Association. The government, he
added, closed many post offices, and people who would go to a town for mail and then patronize
businesses there went elsewhere. But there are as many reasons for a town dying as there are ghost towns,
Barr said.
That clipping I just read from was in a file at the Roseau County Museum about Pelan. Another clipping I
found in the same file was much older, from September 29, 1938, telling about the closing of the Pelan Post
Office. It says this: Discontinuance of the Pelan post office has been ordered by the Post Office Department
as of September 30, [1938], says the Karlstad Advocate. Pelan post office is closely identified with the
pioneer days in Kittson and Roseau counties. The Advocate has nosed up some historical data regarding the
doomed office, and we quote it as follows:
“We do not know what year the post office was first started, but it was somewhere in the 80s when Charles
Long, Oscar Poor, Charles Pelan and Hans T. Olson and other pioneers were establishing an important
trading center at what came to be called Pelan.
“The earliest postmaster at Pelan that we can learn of was a man named Clay who one day disappeared
with the mail pouch and was never heard of again. Hans T. Olson, young blacksmith who had built his home
there and recently married, became the postmaster at the time when mail was brought once a week from
Hallock. In 1889 mail was brought overland from Stephen twice a week. At first the mail for all of Pelan was
kept in a cigar box as there were few letters, and those that came were from Norway and Sweden. Later
when the population increased, Olson built some shelves under the stairway and still later he erected a
small frame building for the post office.
“After Hans Olson, Mrs. Arthur Babcock (Mary Fredrickson) became postmaster while Mr. Babcock was in
charge of the Pelan Advocate. When the Soo Line came thru and the Babcocks moved to Bronson, Bill
Lofgren became the Pelan mail dispenser. After the burning of the Lofgren store, Bill moved to Karlstad
and John Pederson became postmaster. He served a number of years and then retired and went to
California. Mrs. Randi Stenmoe was appointed to fill the vacancy. She has served the community
faithfully and wlll ever since. On September 30 th she will be relieved of her duties and the old post office
will be no more. The mail route to Pelan which now serves some thirty or more patrons will be continued
at least for another month. They should at once make application for the establishment of a regular mail
route.”
So that was the end of the town of Pelan. I’ll talk next week about Pelan Park, created just east of where
the town of Pelan was, and about how the Pauli Lutheran Church came to be there.
Thank you to 
for letting us share our county’s history with your listeners by donating air time, studio time, and production staff every week.