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By Tim Ruzek

Leading up to Election Day in 1900, the Mower County 5th District commissioner’s race was the talk of Austin.

Stirring controversy were allegations toward one candidate – 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 where it meets First Drive Northwest today. This stretch of the Cedar – backed up by the dam – was dotted with islands with various channels and swampland. There was not a lake-shaped waterbody until the 1920s after dredging and filling created Horace Austin State Park.

In 1900, Birkett’s accusers, including the Austin Daily Herald, alleged 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.

Under the proposal, the county would cover $25,000 to $30,000, with the city paying for bridge approaches. Word on the street was 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 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 in 1889 to Austin to work as a bank cashier, was serving on the Austin City Council at this time and had owned a grocery store on downtown for 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 if elected.

“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, 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 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 column attacking Birkett.

The Herald questioned why Birkett remained silent about the bridge until a week before the election and called his statement “misleading in the extreme.” It claimed 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.”

“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.

All the while, 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 to an “island” or “peninsula” but it was a peninsula.

In 1931, an iron, vehicle bridge was placed over the Cedar to replace the footbridge. The iron bridge was used for a short time near Chatfield, Minn. This bridge was used as a crossing at Austin Mill Pond until 1961 when it was replaced by a new bridge over a newly cut river channel.