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Monday, January 27, 2014

What's Sartell got to do with it?

Sartell is the town just north of Sauk Rapids, Minnesota, and a couple miles upriver from St Cloud.  It was originally LeSauk township, where one or two leading citizens of St Cloud had stock farms in the 1890s (D B Searle for one). J B Sartell moved there about 1854 and built a sawmill and grist mill on Watab Creek. Eventually, he became the namesake of the village.
The lucky Sartells were neighbors of the Peter Sand family.  As near as we can tell, Peter's land bordered on the Watab (from legal descriptions of his parcels).  A family story says Peter was in on the mill businesses, at least for awhile.  
The description below says that the grist (flour) mill had 15 feet head (which I think means how deep the dammed water was behind the mill.  There'd be more force with more water, I suppose). A quarter mile further downstream (toward the Mississippi) was the saw mill, with 14 feet of head.  What a lucrative pair of businesses--everyone needed flour as well as lumber. 

By 1906, the SARTELL section in the St Cloud City directory listed almost all  residents either working for the Sartell Brothers OR Watab Paper Co.  

STILL, you say, what have we to do with the Sartell family?  Ahh, you haven't been paying attention.  You've neglected to read every post we've written in the last five years?  What a shame

 Peter Sand's daughter Kate, our great grandpa's sister, married Linton Longly Sartell in 1881. They had eight children, so I expect at least a few of them had kids and took pictures...?  ( OK, I'm sorta developing an unhealthy passion for old pics ☺.  But there ARE worse things).


  1. Not that I'm the mother of a measurement engineer or anything, but from my extensive research, I think feet of head is an old-fashioned measure of water pressure - what we would now call PSI. It measures the force of the water on wheel that turns the grindstone so the more force, the more power to the wheel and therefore the greater the capacity of the mill. Of course, if a feller knew an actual measurement engineer, she could probably get a more coherent explanation. But at any rate, this explanation seems to make more sense as to what is coming AT the mill rather than what is behind it. Yah?

    Love - PT

  2. Look, this blogging-about-family-history gig isn't easy, ok? Sometimes a feller just has to guess about a term, then hope someone else, a faithful reader maybe, will know the real PSI.
    Thanks, PT--see ya SOON ☺!