Exactly 165 years ago in March 1847, the last survivors of the Donner Party reached safety after spending a cataclysmal winter caught in the snowy clutches of Hastings Cutoff, a dead-end pass through the Sierra Nevada in California.
Perched on a New Ulm hillside overlooking the Cottonwood River, Schell’s Brewing Company produced 115,000 barrels of beer last year. Each barrel filled 14 cases. That’s a lot of suds.
When Drea Budahn was age six, her grandfather occasionally took her and her sister to their parent’s apple orchard to be photographed. “And I thought it was the greatest thing ever.”
Tammy Buegler’s father was a 3M engineer and her mother a director of nursing for Union Hospital and later, New Ulm Medical Center.
If 54-year-old Anne Makepeace of New Ulm were to choose a song to describe her life, The Beatles’ 1967 chart buster Getting Better with the oft-repeated positive line “it’s getting better all the time” surely would be one possibility.
While growing up on a farm near Harmony, Arvin Vander Plas was driving tractors at age 6 and rebuilding a John Deere 40 at age 10.
Jon Bregel first became interested in locksmithing while growing up in Fairmont. “My friend’s father owned a lock and key business.”
When age 12, Margo Weyhe was telling people she wanted to grow up to be an interior decorator. “I was always the one decorating the Christmas tree, rearranging furniture, moving knick-knacks, and drawing.”
