Company Owners
The Belle Plaine Salt Company was organized on November 29, 1869. Its members comprised many of the leading men of Belle Plaine, including the borough’s founder, Andrew Gould Chatfield. Chatfield established and named Belle Plaine while serving as a justice of the Minnesota Territory’s Supreme Court. A year after the company formed, Chatfield was elected Judge of Minnesota’s Eighth Judicial Court.
Sanford Albert Hooper, the company president, had earlier partnered with his father-in-law to help build New York’s Genessee Valley Canal and was superintendent of that canal from 1842 to 1845. He moved to Saint Paul in 1856 and came to Belle Plaine in 1858, living there for the rest of his life. Hooper’s published obituary noted ‘he soon identified himself with any enterprise which tended to develop the resources of the country or benefit his family or fellow citizens.’ Hooper was also famous in Belle Plaine folklore for having once burned his sixty-acre hay field and its surrounding oak fences simply because a female guest had expressed an interest in seeing a prairie fire. Fire was apparently a reoccurring feature of Hooper’s Belle Plaine life as on February 4, 1866, a large flouring mill he owned burned. The building and contents were insured for less than half their value, so Hooper would undoubtedly have welcomed the financial promise of a potential salt well a few years later.
.
Andrew Gould Chatfield ~1875 (Minnesota Historical Society)
Major Robert Hutchinson Rose Jr.
Robert Hutchison Rose, often referred to as Major Rose due to his service during the Civil War, served as the company’s first secretary and had earlier been Chatfield’s one-third partner in his original Belle Plaine land claim. In 1868, when Belle Plaine organized as Minnesota’s only borough, Rose became Belle Plaine’s first mayor. While two other company directors, Stephen Avery Packer and Charles Theodore Metzner, were respectively elected to the borough’s first council and as the borough’s first clerk. Hence the Belle Plaine Salt Company’s board of directors included many of the borough’s early civic leaders. The other two directors, besides those named above, were Moses M Carson, a Belle Plaine lumber dealer, and Horace Brown Gates of Saint Paul. The three remaining, non-director members were Israel Putnam Black, a Belle Plaine manufacturer of staves and barrels, William Theodore Wood of Belle Plaine, and Francis Von Heyderstaedt of Saint Paul.
The company’s home-grown nature was evident in that the two Saint Paul members, Gates and Von Heyderstaedt, also had strong ties to Belle Plaine. Von Heyderstaedt ran a mercantile establishment in Belle Plaine until 1865, when he unsuccessfully ran as the Democratic candidate for state treasurer. After his failed campaign, Von Heyderstaedt moved to Saint Paul where he owned a pork packing plant and worked as a real estate dealer.
Of the directors, Gates spent the least time in Minnesota. Yet, while Hooper, Chatfield, Packer, and Rose became the most visible of the Belle Plaine Salt Company directors, Gates may have played a pivotal role in the firm’s origin simply because he was born and spent most of his life in Onondaga, New York, just southeast of the famous salt springs there. Hence, Gates had first-hand knowledge of salt springs and their potential economic impacts on their host communities. Gates moved to Belle Plaine shortly before the 1857 territorial census in which he listed his occupation as lumberman. After a few years, Gates returned to New York. During the years in which the Belle Plaine Salt Company operated, the company’s incorporation document, which was filed August 16, 1872, is the only known record that places Gates in Saint Paul. In both the 1870 United States census and 1875 New York census, Gates was living in Onondaga where he spent the rest of his life. Gates was also responsible for William Theodore Wood being a company member. Wood was Gates’ grandson who he raised after his parents’ deaths when Wood was a young child. In the 1870 U.S. census, Wood was staying in George S. Deming’s Hotel in Belle Plaine, watching over the family’s interest in the well. By 1872, Deming was the company’s third secretary.
.
George S. Deming's Hotel in Belle Plaine from an 1874 map of Carver and Chaska cities.
Belle Plaine Salt Company History
On March 4, 1870, the legislature approved the Belle Plaine Salt Company Act to support the company’s attempt to establish a local source of salt. Under the act’s provisions, for every sixteen hundred dollars the company invested in the well and drilling, they would receive one section of land, 640 acres, up to a maximum of six sections. Assuming those acres were sold for $2.50 an acre, the minimum provided by the act, the company would be reimbursed for their investment. Although the act was cast as being a way to simply defer the company’s costs, according to Bulletin 307 of the University of Minnesota’s Agricultural Experiment Station (1934), the average price of Minnesota farmland was $5.58 an acre in 1870. Consequently, the act’s land grant potentially ensured the company directors a substantial profit even if their Belle Plaine well never produced a single bushel of salt.
Link to 1870 Belle Plaine Salt Company Act
When those lands were transferred to the company in 1871, the company quickly sold the land to the company president, Sanford A. Hooper for $2.50 per acre for a total of $9609.32. On paper, that seemed a simple exchange for the $9,819.45 the company had expended on the well so far. However, the company directors and the state might have had some concerns about Hooper’s records of the company finances if they had known that a decade before coming to Minnesota, Hooper was jailed for fraud.
Portion of 1898 Belle Plaine plat map with rectangle showing the location of 1870 Belle Plaine Salt Company's well. Image is from the Plat Book of Scott County, Minnesota, Northwest Publishing Co., 1898; in the Scott County Historical Society library.
This is the only known image of the Belle Plaine salt well which came from 'This is Our Town' by Harold Albrecht, 1977, sponsored by the Belle Plaine Historical Society. Unfortunately, the book, a labor of love, did not identify the photograph's origin.
Although the well site was cleared land in 1870, the town of Belle Plaine has since retreated from the river and the land where the well once stood has overgrown for many years. The image on the right is the general location of the well site in the summer of 2026 (Kent C. Kirkby).
With the first grant in hand, the company quickly moved to acquire additional salt spring lands. In January of 1871, the Belle Plaine Salt Company publicized their well had produced a brine containing about 20% of pure salt, an extremely rich content as seawater only averages 3.5%. Since the maximum amount of salt that can be dissolved in room temperature water is 36%, the reported brine concentrations were remarkable. Or would have been if the reports were true. However, others began to question those claims as the company could not provide any samples to verify them.
Because of their critics’ suspicions, when the Belle Plaine Salt Company attempted to get a second land grant in 1871, the act’s approval was provisional upon the company employing ‘a competent and practical geologist to be named and selected by the governor of the state, to make a thorough geological survey of the grounds where the works of the said company are located, and of adjacent territory.’ If the geologist’s report did not indicate salt deposits were present in paying quantities, then the company would not receive the land.
By 1871, Charles Boyd Tyler had replaced Rose as company secretary, and he suggested the state ask Alexander Winchell of the Michigan State Geological Survey to access the well. Governor Austin approved the appointment and Winchell visited Minnesota from May 29 through June 6 during which time he also met with the University of Minnesota president, William Watts Folwell, and toured Saint Anthony Falls.
Portrait of Governor Horace Austin painted in 1873 (Minnesota Historical Society), flanked by photographs of University of Minnesota President William Watts Folwell (University of Minnesota Archives) and Alexander Winchell in 1873 (Syracuse University).
Unfortunately for the Belle Plaine Salt Company, Winchell quickly realized there was no potential for salt production at Belle Plaine. However, although his June 17th report effectively condemned the venture, Winchell suggested that since the main expense had already been made, it might be in the state’s interest to know the depth to the bottom of the Potsdam sandstone (an older name for the Cambrian sandstones). However, because Winchell reported there was no chance of the well producing salt, the 1871 Belle Plaine Salt Company Act failed to pass.
Link to 1871 Belle Plaine Salt Company Act
This was when things took a nefarious turn. Winchell’s comment on establishing the base of the Potsdam Sandstone was a simple aside that the information might be of academic use if the state were willing to assume the cost of drilling the well another 300 or 400’. However, the company directors instead used it as a justification to acquire another grant of six more sections of land, two sections for every additional 200 feet drilled. In a clear conflict of interest, Rose, still a company director, successfully ran for the 1872 legislature to ensure the act’s passage. With Rose’s help, a second Belle Plaine Salt Company grant was approved on Leap Year’s Day, Feb. 29, 1872, despite Governor Austin’s opposition. Having succeeded in his goal, Rose did not return to the legislature the following year.
By mid-August 1872, the company had drilled the well a further five hundred feet, guaranteeing the directors another six sections of land. However, it was obvious that the well was now being drilled solely to acquire land rather than salt, as for the last 450’ of drilling the well had failed to produce any water at all, much less saline brine.
.
Announcement of the end of drilling at Belle Plaine well in Aug. 18, 1872 edition of the Saint Paul Daily Press. (link to text)
Salt Spring Land Fraud
In his 1992 Minnesota’s Salt Lands Saga (published in Minnesota History) William E. Lass wrote: “As for the company's motives, neither contemporary nor retrospective observers have ascertained whether its backers were sincere amateurs who falsely believed they had discovered salt or scheming shysters who happily pocketed twelve sections of free land.”
However, Lass was being kind, as Hooper, Chatfield, Tyler, Rose, and other members of the Belle Plaine Salt Company, many of the leading men of their community, clearly committed fraud. While it is possible the directors believed their Belle Plaine well could produce salt at the time of their first land grant, it was obvious those dreams were false long before the company’s second and subsequent requests for land grants. And there were good reasons to suspect even their first land grant request was fraudulent.
From the start, the directors’ inability to produce samples of saline water was damning. Even in the 1870s, it was remarkably easy to assess a water sample’s salt content, and any experienced druggist would have been able to support the Belle Plaine Salt Company’s claims – if they had any validity. A drop of saline fluid held in a flame burns with a distinct yellow/brown color, while titration with silver nitrate would allow a druggist to determine the exact amount of salt present. In retrospect, the abject failure of the company officials to produce any evidence of salt was particularly condemning as the company’s treasurer, James Madison Sprague, was Belle Plaine’s druggist.
January 27, 1870, Star Tribune (link to text).
May 29, 1870 Star Tribune article (link to text).
August 28, 1870, Saint Paul Daily Press (link to text).
February 8, 1871, Star Tribune (link to text).
Selection of articles praising the Belle Plaine salt well's potential over the course of its early history. The one at left was published on January 1, 1870, prior to the start of drilling but noted salt produced by distillation of the spring water. The center article was published on May 19, 1870 and promised the Belle Plaine salt works would soon compete with those of New York. The two articles at right were published on August 28, 1870 and February 8, 1871. Both assured readers that the well was just about to reach salt brine of uncommon strength. In every case, the company's officers were the source of the rosy predictions.
A chronological history of the Belle Plaine well as recorded through news articles.
Yet, despite any supporting evidence, in January of 1870, the company told newspapers that the ‘springs so strongly impregnated with salt, that even the surface water, from distillation on an ordinary stove, has produced fine specimens of salt.’ They suggested the Belle Plaine salt spring along with those found by Skinner, suggested a ‘great salt deposit’ underlying much of the state. Missing from all the journalist hoopla was any actual evidence of salt samples or confirmed brine assays. The company never established the presence of salt before commencing operations nor could they produce any samples of salt or saline fluid during the well’s drilling.
While even the first land grant was suspect, there was no mistaking the second grant as anything but an attempt to acquire and sell as much of the state’s salt spring lands as possible. The company directors’ duplicity was also attested by their attempt to secure yet other grants of salt springs land in 1873 and 1875, despite their utter failure to find or produce salt.
Minnesota’s Third Geological Survey
In 1872, to forestall any further loss of state lands to the Belle Plaine Salt Company or a copycat corporation, Governor Austin and the state legislature initiated Minnesota’s third geological survey. Because of corruption and fraud associated with the first and second state surveys, it was decided the third survey should be run through the University of Minnesota rather than by a political appointee. And it was not coincidence that Newton Horace Winchell, the younger brother of Alexander Winchell, was invited to run that survey. Alexander Winchell had impressed both Governor Austin and William Watts Folwell, the university president, with his credibility concerning the Belle Plaine well, which paved the way for Horace Winchell’s appointment. Hence, the start of both Minnesota’s third geological survey and the university’s geology department were tied to the Belle Plaine well.
Link to Geological and Natural History Survey enabling act.
That connection continued for another three years. One of Newton Winchell’s first tasks as the new state geologist was to fend off another attempt by the Belle Plaine Salt Company to secure additional salt spring lands. In February of 1873, Winchell visited Belle Plaine and, like his brother earlier, ascertained there was no hope of finding salt deposits there. A later analysis of water from the Belle Plaine well by survey chemist, Stephen F. Peckham, confirmed the Belle Plaine water was simply ‘hard’ spring water that lacked any salt content. The salt samples the Belle Plaine Salt Company initially claimed to come from the spring were either not sodium chloride or were fraudulent. In 1875, the Belle Plaine Salt Company made a final effort to acquire salt spring lands but was again rebuffed by Winchell and the university regents.
Twenty-seven years later, as he closed out his time as state geologist, Winchell recalled the Belle Plaine Salt Company in his last annual report.
.
Newton Horace Winchell, director of the Geological and Natural History Survey of Minnesota (University of Minnesota Archives)
.
Cover of Winchell's 24th Annual Report of the Geological and Natural History Survey of Minnesota (University of Minnesota Archives)
‘When the survey began, in 1872, there was in possession of the State, in a more or less uncertain condition as to location and value, a class of lands known as Salt Spring lands. Of this land grant, which came from the United States when the State was admitted into the Union, the Legislature had been induced, under various specious pretexts of developing the brine alleged to exist at Belle Plaine, to part with two large bodies of land. One was granted by the Legislature of 1870. Another was granted by the Legislature of 1871 conditioned on a favorable report by a competent geologist, to be appointed by the governor. Gov. Austin appointed Prof. A. Winchell, who reported adversely, rendering the act inoperative. Still the project survived, and the Legislature of 1872 was induced to make another grant of six sections of Salt Spring lands for the same purpose to the same company, without conditions. This history plainly indicated that the Salt Spring lands were the prey of delusive enterprises, and would in time be frittered away without rendering the State any return. Indeed the present state geologist had no sooner fairly entered upon his duties than he was solicited for aid to the Belle Plaine Salt Co. with a view to the designation of other salt lands where said company might still further explore at the expense of the Salt Spring lands. And still further, after these lands had been set aside for the expenses of the Geological and Natural History Survey of the state, the Belle Plaine Salt Co. pursued the Board of Regents. A bill was introduced in the Legislature of 1875 (?) [actually February of 1874] authorizing the Belle Plaine Salt Co. to explore for brine on any of the Salt Spring lands of the state, and ordering the regents, after a certain amount of work had been done, to pay said company by deeding to it some portion of these lands. The bill never became a law. But it still further shows the precarious position of the Salt Spring land grant.’
A Precedent?
Hence, in the 1870s, some of the leading figures of Belle Plaine society deliberately defrauded their young state of six additional sections of land and tried to do so again multiple times.
But who was responsible for their decision? After all, Chatfield was a state supreme court justice and Rose became one upon Chatfield’s death. Although that did not make them immune to corruption, their reputations still mattered to them. Other company directors were merchants and newspaper owners, who could also be harmed by accusations of fraud. Relying on Minnesota historical sources, the company directors seem an unlikely cast for such a land swindle. However, a possible clue lies in another state’s history.
While Gates may have been an instigating force for the Belle Plaine Salt Company and Chatfield, Rose, and other Belle Plaine businessmen participated in and let the company benefit from their social reputations, the company’s president, Sanford Albert Hooper, most likely guided the company’s transition from developing a potential salt spring to deliberate land fraud. Minnesota biographies of Hooper usually reference his time as superintendent of New York’s Genesse Valley Canal, but neglect to mention why he left that position.
.
Sanford Albert Hooper from 'This is Our Town' by Harold Albrecht (Scott County Historical Society Library).
In August of 1845, the Genessee Valley Canal Board charged Hooper and his successor and partner, Orin N. Reynolds, with gross malfeasance and fraud. Hooper and Reynolds created and submitted false records of payments for labor and supplies, diverting thousands of dollars into their hands. They took advantage of their control over the canal’s payroll by having workers sign pay slips that did not have their pay amounts included. After paying the men their wages, Hooper and Reynolds then filled in fraudulent amounts on the signed pay slips and submitted them for reimbursement, fraudulently submitting affidavits every two months that the amounts were accurate.
In one instance, a worker who earned twenty-five cents for a fourth of a day’s labor was listed in Hooper’s books for 38 days of labor at $28.50. When other workers left their jobs, Hooper and Reynolds continued to submit and pocket the workers’ pay for weeks afterward. Multiplied across the canal’s workforce, such graft added up, but the two men did not confine their graft to payroll. Purchases of lumber, whose going rate was less than four dollars per thousand feet, were listed on Hooper’s and Reynold’s accounts as costing $18 to $28 per thousand feet, with the difference again going to the two men.
August 16, 1845, article in The Times Union announcing the Canal Board's accusations against Hooper and Reynolds.
.
March 2, 1846, New York Tribune notice of Hooper's arrest.
.
March 6, 1846 article in The Daily National Pilot noting Reynolds' suicide and Hooper's incarceration.
March 10, 1846, article in The Fredonia Censor on Hooper's incarceration mentioning an influential friend may post his bond.
Hooper was likely saved from a lengthy sentence not only by his family and political connections but two other mitigating circumstances. The investigation into Hooper’s and Reynolds’ fraud led to the discovery of far greater canal fraud that not only dwarfed Hooper’s petty dealings but turned the state’s attention to other politically powerful figures, which reduced the legislature’s eagerness for convictions. In addition, Reynolds, Hooper’s partner in fraud, had taken his own life on January 27, 1846, shortly before Hooper’s arrest, which allowed Hooper to shift blame onto Reynolds.
By June of 1852, Hooper had even managed to work his way back into canal affairs, supervising the construction of a dam at Mt. Morris. In April of 1853, Hooper’s finances had improved to the point where he could purchase and renovate the American Hotel in Geneseo, which would mirror the Belle Plaine Hotel, his first successful business venture at Belle Plaine. His success in Belle Plaine though only came after failure in Saint Paul.
In August of 1856, Hooper was awarded the contract for building the piers for the first Wabasha Street bridge. At the time, Hooper was aware his Genessee Valley story might be a handicap, so he instead claimed to be from Dubuque, Iowa. Changing his origins though did not change his abilities, and by December 4, 1856, Saint Paul newspapers promised readers that the bridge project would still move forward and that “the failure of one of the contractors, S. A. Hooper, will only, at most, retard the work for a short time…”
Wabasha Avenue Bridge in 1870 (Minnesota Historical Society).
During his time in Belle Plaine, Hooper was often praised in newspaper articles, but negative portrayals would occasionally arise, both before and after his time with the Belle Plaine Salt Company. On February 14, 1863, the Committee of Claims ‘reported adversely’ to claims Hooper made for forage and subsistence furnished to state troops and express dispatch riders, which suggests Hooper was once again inflating costs, this time at the expense of the state’s Civil War commitment. Later, in September of 1880, Hooper was again in the news having been overheard claiming that he had promised a politician $3,000 to procure a contract for dredging operations on the Minnesota River, which he subsequently paid out of a $10,000 appropriation from Congress for the work. Although Hooper admitted the conversation was reported accurately, he claimed he had only been joking, making a sarcastic comment to a political opponent. He even swore out an affidavit to that effect, one rather similar to the scores of pay affidavits he had sworn out thirty-five years earlier on the Genessee Valley Canal.
Regardless of whether the Belle Plaine Salt Company began legitimately, within a year, its activities shifted from developing a potential state resource to defrauding the state of land. Over a century and a half later, it is impossible to prove things beyond a shadow of a doubt, so Hooper would once again escape a modern courtroom. However, based on his history both before and after the Belle Plaine Salt Company years, Hooper remains the primary suspect for the company’s transition into fraud.
Belle Plaine Epilogue
Chatfield’s death from diphtheria on October 3, 1875, deprived the Belle Plaine Salt Company of its best-known director. Shortly after his death, the company finally ceased their attempts to defraud the state of additional salt spring lands. Hundreds attended Chatfield’s funeral. One pallbearer was ex-governor Henry Hastings Sibley, who had been Chatfield’s neighbor at Mendota when Chatfield first came to Minnesota.
Chatfield’s original interest in Belle Plaine salt may have reflected his precarious financial circumstances. On the 1870 census, Chatfield’s self-reported net worth was only $600 in personal estate with $2300 in real estate, far less than what many of his co-directors reported. Hooper claimed an estate of $22,000, while Rose had combined assets of $30,000 and Packer $51,000. Upon Chatfield’s death in 1875, his grave marker was purchased by others as his widow lacked the means to purchase such a memorial.
Chatfield and Hooper markers in Belle Plaine's Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration Cemetery (photos by Kirkby). Chatfield's marker can be seen in right distance in photograph of Hooper plot.
However, Chatfield’s death in 1875 might not have had as much impact on the end of the Belle Plaine Salt Company as Hooper’s appointment that same year to a committee convened to build a planned second state prison at Shakopee. In light of Winchell’s dogged opposition to his salt ventures, Hooper might have viewed the construction of a new prison as more fertile grounds for his avarice.
Unfortunately for Hooper, the legislature chose Saint Cloud as the prison’s location, which opened in 1889. Shakopee did become the location for the state’s first women prison, but not until three decades after Hooper’s death, so he gained no advantage.
Unsurprisingly, the homes of the two men reflected their disparate circumstances. Chatfield lived in a relatively modest Belle Plaine home built in 1855 which collapsed from neglect on July 29, 1929. Hooper’s more lavish home still stands. Its next owner expanded the structure and added a two-story outhouse, which soon replaced the salt spring well as Belle Plaine’s most famous feature.
On right is Chatfield's house as it appeared in 1919 from This is Our Town by Herbert Albrecht (in Scott County Historical Society Library). In center is Hooper's original house with its extension and two-story outhouse built by its second owner on the left (photos by Kirkby).
Meanwhile, in 1884, Hooper’s nemesis, Winchell, finally reported Minnesota’s first producing salt well. As it turns out, that salt well was almost as far from Belle Plaine as possible while still being in Minnesota. It was drilled in the northwestern corner of Minnesota, five miles west of the Red River and four and a half miles south of the Canadian border. Like the Belle Plaine well, it did not prove to be economic, but unlike the Belle Plaine well, it actually provided samples of salt. Winchell displayed that salt at the 1884 Cotton Centennial in New Orleans. To date, it remains Minnesota’s only salt produced from a legitimate brine well rather than a 19th century scam.