LOOKBACK: Proposed bridge stirs election controversy in 1900
Mower County commissioner’s race dramatized by allegations that one candidate only running to get crossing over Cedar River
Leading up to Election Day in 1900, the Mower County 5th District commissioner’s race was the talk of Austin.
Stirring up controversy were allegations toward one of the candidates — local merchant Henry Birkett — claiming Birkett was on the ballot only to push through county funding for building a bridge over the Cedar River where Austin Mill Pond is today.
At the time, North Main Street ended about where it meets First Drive Northwest today. This stretch of the Cedar — backed up by the dam — was dotted with islands and featured various channels and swampland. There was not much of a lake-shaped waterbody until the 1920s after extensive dredging and filling to create Horace Austin State Park.
In 1900, Birkett’s accusers, including the Austin Daily Herald, alleged that such a bridge — priced at $40,000 to $50,000 (nearly $1.6 million in today’s dollars) — only would benefit Birkett’s friends who owned land in the backwaters area.
Under the proposal, the county would cover $25,000 to $30,000 of its cost, with the city paying for the bridge approaches. Word on the street was that the city council would support the plan but Birkett needed to be elected to secure the county’s funding.
“The county commissioner’s fight in this district is a hot one,” the Herald wrote Nov. 3, 1900, adding that Birkett and his opponent Joseph Keenan, who built and sold wagons and buggies, must be “ambitious for political honors for the pay of a county commissioner consists largely of kicks and roastings.”
Weeks earlier, the Herald called the commissioner’s race “one of the hottest fights being waged. It is still a hunt for votes. It is going to be a close vote, and friendship is going to count more than politics.”
Birkett, a native of Canada who moved to Austin in 1889 to work as the new Austin National Bank’s cashier, was serving on the Austin City Council at this time and had run a grocery store on Main Street for about nine years.
With accusations swirling one week before the election, Birkett gave a statement to the Mower County Transcript newspaper — a friendly media outlet to him, saying he never made a deal for building a bridge north of Main Street if elected as county commissioner.
“This is absolutely false, and I wish to assure the people of this district that I am in no way directly or indirectly in any deal or under any promise or agreement whatsoever to support any such measure,” Birkett wrote Oct. 30, 1900.
The Herald didn’t believe Birkett, whose nomination in June at the Republican convention was described as a “considerable surprise” when he defeated, 21–5, the incumbent county commissioner J.W.C. Dinsmore, who chaired the convention.
Birkett wasn’t even known to be a candidate at the time, drawing criticism for the secrecy.
“Mr. Dinsmore feels no regret for it is a rather thankless task, one of being damned if you do and damned if you don’t,” the Herald wrote June 22, 1900.
On Nov. 1, 1900, the Herald ran a scathing opinion article attacking Birkett.
The Herald questioned why Birkett remained silent about the bridge until a week before Election Day and called his statement “misleading in the extreme.” It stated that Birkett’s actions on the city council have supported “all the so-called improvements that have resulted in depleting the city treasury and making the city practically bankrupt.”
It also called into question Birkett’s land dealings as a city councilman with landowners in the Cedar’s backwaters or what it called “the pond of water.” The Herald claimed Birkett would bankrupt the county and city with the bridge project.
“This scheme to build a bridge is so costly to the taxpayers, so unnecessary and uncalled for that it has been a matter of general concern and talk since Mr. Birkett’s nomination,” the Herald wrote. “During all this time, Mr. Birkett has remained as silent as an oyster. He is at last smoked out by public sentiment and by the indignation of the people against the attempt to squander $40,000 or more for such purposes.”
The bridge would be of no use “to anyone except two or three property owners,” the Herald wrote.
In the election lead up, the Herald made clear its support of Keenan for commissioner. On Oct. 26, 1900, the Herald declared that Keenan “is assured by a big majority,” calling him “honest” and a “good businessman.” A week later, it claimed Keenan would make an “exceptionally good commissioner.”
On Election Day, Keenan defeated Birkett by 172 votes.
Four years later, Birkett moved to Mahnomen, Minn., to start a bank. He later moved to Owatonna — where he lived prior to Austin — and died there in 1926 at age 78.
A wooden footbridge eventually was built in 1927 for about $2,000 over the Cedar River north of Main Street as part of the state park’s ongoing development. Locals went back and forth about whether the bridge crossed over to an island or a peninsula but it was a peninsula.
Only four years later in 1931, a used, iron bridge was placed over the Cedar to replace the footbridge. The iron bridge had been used for a short time near Chatfield, Minn. This vehicle bridge was used crossing until 1961 when it was replaced by a new bridge over a newly cut river channel into Mill Pond.