The Sanborn family had owned land and farmed in Crystal Township in the years before Robbinsdale was incorporated as village. Arthur Sanborn became the first President of Crystal Village after it was incorporated on January 11, 1887. In the years before Crystal Village was dissolved, His son Charles Sanborn, along with Horatio Stillman, John Russ, and John Shumway, owned much of the large, unplatted areas in what was eventually incorporated as Robbinsdale.
During the 1920s, when Sanborn Terrace was platted and development began around Crystal Lake, Robbinsdale experienced an unprecedented building boom. Those years also saw city’s population increase 23.3% to 4,427.
Times were looking up and people thought it would last forever, but much of the property north of Crystal Lake would not be developed until after the Great Depression and the Second World War.
The Sanborn Development Company, managed by Sarah Gates Sanborn and her older daughter Charlotte Sanborn Helberg, worked with the David C. Bell Investment Co. to develop and sell the properties. They published this brochure in 1923. The newspaper clippings below are from the same time period.
We raised our family on the corner of France & Shoreline Drive (4300) Nice area still. Great to see the early photos.
Note that (see the statement “Building restrictions will protect purchasers”) the contracts for these lots or the homes built on them would no doubt have included the discriminatory clauses known as racial covenants that excluded anyone other than white purchasers, as was common in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area in the first half of the 20th century. See the U of M’s “Mapping Prejudice” website for further information: https://mappingprejudice.umn.edu/