Benton County Historical Society

A lost and forgotten ballroom in East St. Cloud was home to big band dances, weddings, pageants, and holiday dances was ultimately converted into a rollerskating rink.

Way back in the early days of Benton County, before there was a county fair, there were Market Days pretty much in every community and they were wildly popular.

Your local historical society is a great place to preserve old artifacts and facts from our past, but sometimes they are called on to do a little detective work too.

If you look at a map of Duelm today and compare it to the Platt map of the town from 1909 they look pretty much the same.

Most of us know where Ronneby is in Benton County, but did you know it actually started out called St. Francis? Or, at least part of it did.

Municipal Park along the Mississippi River on the north end of Sauk Rapids is a very popular park. However, at one point that was a completely different townsite.

You can't call Benton City a ghost town, because hundreds of people still live there, but it is definitely a forgotten city for most of us.

Downtown Sauk Rapids has gone through many changes over the years with a lot of development and redevelopment. What's left today are just seven buildings in downtown that date back more than 100 years.

Brennyville is an unincorporated town in northern Benton County that was once the home to a large cheese factory.

During the days of prohibition, Benton County was just as established for running moonshine as Stearns County was, although most families in the county are still reluctant to talk about their past connections with Chicago gangsters. Ostby says one of the moonshine hotspots was Popple Creek and store/saloon.

Talk to anybody who lived in Benton County back in the 1950s ask them if they had ever been to Fruthville.

It's hard to imagine now but at one time there was a small community that existed along Highway 23 about halfway between St. Cloud and Foley.