Sherburne County Heritage Center Interpretive Plan Final Report 2005

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Exhibit Station: 2 Topic: Transportation —Bailey Station Story: Orlando Bailey Sto For 125 years, from 1852 until 1977, a place known as Bailey Station served travelers passing through Sherburne County on one of Minnesota's most important transportation routes, known today as Highway 10. The current Highway 10 was part of a section of the Red River Ox Cart Trails that had been recently upgraded as a military road from Point Douglass at the mouth of the St. Croix River to Ft. Gaines north of today's Little Falls when Orlando Bailey arrived in 1852 and settled in Big Lake Township. His location was well chosen, near the shore of the Mississippi River and near the edge of the prairie to the west and pines to the north. Along the old trail where Bailey planted his roots, hundreds of traders from Pembina traveled to St. Paul each year to trade furs for supplies and manufactured goods. When Bailey arrived, Highway 10 was one of the most important military and commercial routes in Minnesota Territory. Bailey arrived just four years after the area was surveyed and opened for settlement. Bailey started a farm and built a large home that they also used as a stage station and hotel to capitalize on the traffic that followed the military road. Stages soon headed as far west as Breckenridge, and Bailey's Station became an important wayside stop. Reaching Becker in 1867, the St. Paul and Pacific Railroad tracks soon followed the same corridor a half -mile north of the road and the Bailey Station added a railroad siding. After the railway replaced the stage traffic, and the Orlando Bailey's stage stop became a farm. It was described by his nephew who stayed there in 1870 as a "big house, no longer used as a tavern, but roomy and pleasant with broad piazzas along two sides, a large laundry and woodshed at the rear and ample barns and stables for the stage horses and considerable stock of cattle and farm horses." (Vernon Bailey, "The Hiram Bailey Family, Pioneers of America and Early Settlers of the Middle West," typescript, SCHS, 15) A small crossroads community grew near Bailey's Station at the intersection of County Road 14 and 15 with a school, cemetery, and two retail businesses. After the railroad arrived, Bailey gave up his hotel and stage business. He farmed and served as Sherburne County sheriff, county commissioner, justice of the peace, and postmaster before dying in 1897. (Gemini Research, Phase I and II Investigation of Historic Structures Along T.H. 10 At Bailey, Sherburne County, MN," MN DOT Report SP 7102-100, April 4, 2001, p. 5; Further document of retail businesses is necessary.) _Vic Peterson and Gas Station Story Highway10, formerly an old ox cart trail and military road, was designated a tourist highway in 1916. It became part of the Jefferson Highway, an international tourist route stretching from New Orleans to Winnipeg. The route became one of Minnesota's first paved roads when an eighteen -foot -wide concrete roadway was laid in1920. (MNDOT Report, April 4, 2001: 6) Sherburne County Historical Society Heritage Center Interpretive Plan, April 21, 2005, page 15