Support your local historical society and your local hardware store by picking up one of our books at Coast to Coast, I mean, Welna Ace Hardware 4140 West Broadway in beautiful, downtown Robbinsdale!
Check out our little book of 15 Robbinsdale postcard reproductions you can tear out and mail! Amuse and delight far away friends and relatives with these handpicked postcards from the Robbinsdale Historical Society and Jeff Vick’s collection. Celebrate our quasquicentennial with historic postcards from the past.
If you don’t already own one, it is way past time you had a copy Images of America: Robbinsdale adorning your coffee table or toilet tank top. This lavishly illustrated pictorial history of our fair city makes the perfect Whiz Bang Days gift. Robbinsdale has a pretty good story to tell! Way back when, Andrew B. Robbins often passed through the area just north of Minneapolis by train. Impressed by the landscape, he purchased 90 acres of rolling hills and lakes. In 1887, he platted a tract called Robbinsdale Park. Five years later, the development was incorporated as a village bearing his name. Robbins worked tirelessly to attract residents, business, and industry. When the transit company refused to extend a streetcar line to the area, he built his own. City dwellers came out in droves to enjoy hunting, fishing, boating, and the bathing beaches on Robbinsdale’s lakes. In the 1920s, the village gained notoriety with every new issue of Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang. Created by local veteran Wilford Hamilton Fawcett, the little humor magazine launched a publishing empire. Along with the rest of the country, Robbinsdale grew up in the 20th century, but the first suburb of Minneapolis still feels like the small town Andrew B. Robbins dreamed up more than a century ago.
Inspired by an afternoon visit to the Robbinsdale Historical Society Museum, author Pete Richie started volunteering for the organization. He thinks you should too! Images of America: Robbinsdale showcases many of the historical society’s photographic treasures.
Artwork courtesy of Alison Nguyen