In 1917, the Miller and Hurlbutt families worked with the Reidhead Company realtors to subdivide and create the Robbinsdale Home Gardens addition between 42nd and 46th Avenues North, east of Vera Cruz over to Toledo Avenue North. In 1918 the Reidhead Company formed a partnership with Edgar Noyes Realty and a former druggist, Henry Voegeli.
Robbinsdale Home Gardens properties were marketed as thrift lots, with room to grow food and raise chickens. Buyers were urged to come out to where the taxes were low and to plant a garden as soon as they made a down payment.
This price includes electric service in alley, Easy Payments—$10 Per Month. DISCOUNT FOR ALL CASH. PERFECT TITLE. This property is ON THE NEWLY PAVED ROCKFORD ROAD near the Robbinsdale street car and the running time to Loop District is 20 minutes. These 1/4 ACRE TRACTS are located on high level ground containing rich, black soil. Here is the best property in or near Minneapolis. Plant a garden on your own land this week. Cut the high cost of living by producing your own fresh vegetables, eggs and chickens. High level lots, best garden soil, near schools, churches, car-line, banks, stores and lakes. Most of the houses in this have electric lights, full line of plumbing and are all modern and up-to-date in every respect. Reasonable building restrictions. Bungalow Garages permitted. Bungalows financed and built for you. If you come by auto, you can reach the property from the Loop District via 7th Street North to Emerson Avenue North, to Broadway, to Crystal Lake avenue to Forty-second Avenue or Rockford Road, thence west only few short blocks. This route is paved all the way. If you come by street car, take a Robbinsdale street car to end of line, walk only short distance west to sale. Autos will meet every car at Rockford Road and are at your service if you prefer to ride.
In Minneapolis Tribune – May4th, 1924
Houses built in the subdivision in the 1920s had large combination living and dining rooms, front porches, full basements, furnaces, kitchen sinks, finished hardwood floors and electric lights. Edgar Noyes was able to sell seventy-one home sites in about seven years. The average size of these modest homes was twenty by twenty-two feet.
Noyes did not sell houses to everyone who could afford to buy them. If you look on the University of Minnesota’s Mapping Prejudice website, you’ll find restrictions inserted into the deeds of the Robbinsdale Home Gardens properties. Most of them contain this covenant:
shall not be assigned, sold or leased by the grantee, his heirs, administrators or assigns to anyone except a person of the Caucasian race
Racial covenants like this can be found in the deeds of properties throughout the city of Robbinsdale. These discriminatory clauses were inserted to prevent people who were not white from buying or renting homes. These covenants were legally-enforceable and anyone who challenged them risked forfeiting their claim to the property. They were designed to keep neighborhoods segregated. Developers often worked with park commissioners to make land adjacent to racially-restricted neighborhoods into public green space. Enforcement of racial covenants was legal in Minnesota until 1953.
The Robbinsdale Historical Society and Robbinsdale Human Rights Commission are committed to researching and sharing the history of racial covenants and their impact on our community. Resources are available to promote a greater understanding and build networks of people who wish to get involved and address how racial covenants impact our cities today.
Just Deeds is acting now to help homeowners and cities by providing free legal and title services, along with access to online tools and volunteer opportunities.
Mapping Prejudice is a team of historians, geographers, librarians, digital
humanists and community activists seeking to expose structural racism. The project is ongoing. You can see the 26,000 racial covenants found by Mapping Prejudice volunteers so far, and download shapefiles, spreadsheets, and static cartography on their website.
