A.B. Robbins

Our Library Table

This is the seventh in a series of posts featuring Dorthy Hartig’s History of Robbinsdale. This informal account was written for the Robbinsdale Library Club in 1948. A copy was placed Lee’s School’s cornerstone time … Read more

Some Have Found A Solution!

“In June Miss Edith Robbins graduated from the University of Minnesota with a Bachelor of Science degree. All five of Mr. Robbins daughters graduated from the University of Minnesota, two of them earning Masters Degrees … Read more

A Bright Future

On April 19th, 1893, Robbinsdale was organized as a village, consisting of parts of three sections of the original twenty-four of the township, one third of the territory of Crystal, with ten miles of improved … Read more

Mr. Robbins Comes to Town

This is the fourth in a series of posts featuring Mrs. Henry E. Hartig’s,  History of Robbinsdale. Prepared for the Robbinsdale Library Club, Hartig noted that while the material she used came from a variety … Read more

The Village of Crystal

1887 In 1886 Minneapolis made an effort to annex all bordering townships to secure more taxable property and money for improvements and perhaps to outclass St. Paul in population. At once, the people of Crystal … Read more

Souvenir Robbinsdale

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It can be conservatively predicted that within a few years the village of Robbinsdale, located just north of the city limits of Minneapolis will be noted as the choicest of its suburban beauty spots, remarkable for splendid residences, situated amid picturesque surroundings of woodland and lake.

Already the certainty that Minneapolis is destined to become a great metropolis has enhanced the values of land adjacent to the chain of lakes within its limits. Calhoun, Harriet, Lake of the Isles and Cedar to the extent that only people of considerable means feel they can afford home in their vicinity. Soon it will be only the rich whose mansions will mark the sites of the present pretty bungalows and the modest dwellings.
Today the conviction is being forced upon those who desire to enjoy the delightful combination of city and rual life, made possible by electric roads and the automobile, that location of their homes to insure permanency, must be in a new direction and where too, there will be more exclusiveness than along the boulevards and driveways which constitute the playground of the city.
The village of Robbinsdale, which nestles between two gem-like lakes, with dells and groves just off its main street, possesses just this ideal location, coupled with the same charm of natural scenery which is now beguiling to the Calhoun and Harriet district. In time Robbinsdale too will become the home of millionaires, but this period is farther remote. This is certainly foreordained as it is that the business district of Minneapolis is to be doubled, tripled and quadrupled in area.
It requires no stretch of imagination to prophesy this. The present rate of growth of Minneapolis and the natural distribution of its population will bring these changes about. The man is not infrequently met who can tell when he could have bought business sites now worth hundreds of thousands of dollars for a few hundreds; who recollects when there were frame dwelling houses where now are sky scrapers, mammoth department stores and splendid office buildings. Most of these changes have come within ten years, with in which time too, whole districts of suburban property have been built up from farms and pasture lands…what then of the future…the next ten years or even five?

-Robbinsdale Souvenir, Suburban Minneapolis
1911