WOODBURY MN (WNN) – Do you know how Radio Drive In Woodbury got its name?
There was a radio station there. Which one? KDWBEEEEEEEEEEE, said a chorus of voices, just like the DJ said it on the radio.
KDWB was located during the 1950s where the State Farm building stood. Now Whole Foods, Barnes & Nobles and other retail shops are located on the site. Prior to being renamed Radio Drive, the street was known as Blacksmith’s Road and Saloon Keeper’s Road.
This radio and road tidbit – and lots more – were shared during a history of Woodbury bus tour Wednesday organized by the Woodbury Heritage Society. Serving as tour guides were members of the society’s board of directors – Tom Bielenberg, the son of Woodbury’s first mayor, Wayne Schilling whose family farmed in Woodbury for generations, and Margaret Wachholz.
Each street had stories.
The city of Woodbury and Woodbury Drive are named after Judge Levi Woodbury of New Hampshire. Judge Woodbury,a lawyer and politician, was a friend of the first town board chairman, John Colby. He was Secretary of the Navy, Secretary of the Treasury, Assistant Judge of the Supreme Court and on his way to election as the 14th president until his premature death.
Initially our township was named Red Rock after a sacred stone that legend holds was painted by the famous Dakota chief, Little Crow. The town was renamed in 1859 when the state legislature discovered another town named Red Rock in Minnesota.
The bus passed St. John Lutheran Church on St. John’s Drive opened in 1870. It along with Salem Lutheran and Woodbury Methodist (now The Grove.) were the original churches in Woodbury.
In 1870, St. John’s was about a half mile further down St. John’s Drive from its current location (intersection of Valley Creek Road and St. John’s Drive), next to St. John Lutheran Cemetery.
Across from the church was one of Woodbury’s seven one-room schoolhouses. It was called School District #26 or Fish Lake School. Back then, a school district could be organized if seven families had children attending the school. This area, currently known as Powers Lake Development, was originally known as the Buffalo Settlement because many people from Buffalo, New York settled there.
Coming out of the Powers Lake neighborhood and turning right onto Woodbury Drive, across from Markgraf’s Lake we saw a red building-Ferdinand Markgraf’s blacksmith shop in business from 1885 to 1965 . There were several blacksmith shops in Woodbury fixing farm machinery, shoeing horses.
Middleton, Bielenberg, McHattie – do the names sound familiar? Of course, we use them all the time! They are among the earliest farm families to call Woodbury home and now remembered on street signs, schools, etc.
At Woodbury’s oldest fire station on Afton Road, Pat Edlund, a board member of the heritage society, stepped onto the bus to tell the history of the station and one of Woodbury’s earliest roads.
Military Road was the first road laid in Woodbury in 1852. It’s Woodbury’s “Mother” Road and was built by the military. Afton Road was the second one and was named Poor Farm Road because it extended into Ramsey County to the Poor Farm.
The bus tour visited the Woodbury Lions Veterans Memorial and the Angels of Hope Memorial, both located in the grounds of Woodbury City Hall. Angels of Hope is a place of refuge for families who have lost a child and is part of a worldwide network.
City Hall’s grounds are also the site of one of the oldest trees in Woodbury. Josh Kinney, a city parks planner, guided our group to a 230-year-old oak tree. Members of Wolterstorff family joined us at the tree which was growing on their land that is now owned by the city.
At the corner of Radio Drive and Lake Road stands the building now known as the Heritage House/Museum and Heirloom Gardens. It was built about 1870 as an attachment to the log cabin home of original property owner Frederick Raths. Inside the house are photos of Woodbury earliest residents. A baby cradle, a scenario of life lived in centuries past.
Bonnie Metzger Haines was looking at the photos in the home when she. suddenly exclaimed, “That’s a picture of my parents on their wedding day!” Bonnie now lives in Stillwater but pointed to the trees a mile north of Radio Drive and said that is where the house she grew up in stood. She recalled one summer day when her siblings and friends ran around Woodlane Drive, up Lake Road and down Road Drive “ just having fun.“
The Woodbury Heritage Society Bus Tour was educational and fun. Lots of things to learn about our city. It ended at Valley Creek Park where the Miller Barn stands. More society board members greeted the tour participants with refreshments and slices of cake.
The tour advanced the Heritage Society’s goal “to preserve and document Woodbury’s history and to aid residents of our community in learning and understanding more about Woodbury’s early years.”
