Visit Historic Sites

During the hot days of summer, the Rookie Olson family did all their cooking in the summer kitchen. The building was moved to the Heritage Center property in 2006 from its location off County Road 70, just south of the Cambridge Community College.

The Edblad family arrived in Isanti County in 1859. Isak and Christina settled on a property just north of

Cambridge with their three children, Olaf, Mary, Bessie, and Maggie. Originally from Jamtland, Sweden, the Edblads were one of the first families from that region to call Isanti County home. Shortly after their arrival, the family built a small one-room log cabin overlooking the Rum River, one mile north of Cambridge.

Isak, the son of a Lutheran pastor, held the county’s first church services in the tiny cabin. As more settlers arrived and word spread, the Edblads constructed a small addition to accommodate the growing congregation. And in 1864, the cabin officially served as the Cambridge Lutheran Church. The cabin you see today is a period structure that was built in Spring Lake – North Branch Township in 1861. Descendants of Isak and Christine took the initiative to purchase and move the cabin in 1972. The cabin itself is fully furnished with Edblad family artifacts and pays homage to the early pioneer family.

St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church at Bradford is primarily significant for its association with the German population of Isanti County.

St. John’s is a well preserved example of the small churches that have served Isanti County’s rural population throughout the county’s history. The Germans were among the earliest ethnic groups to settle Isanti County. Their presence has been overshadowed by the vast numbers of Swedish immigrants who followed them, but isolated German settlements survive in southwestern Isanti County and in the southeastern part of Bradford Township. The German Lutheran homesteaders of Bradford Township organized and built St. John’s in 1882. The congregation was never large, and during most of its history the church shared a pastor with the German Lutheran congregations at either Crown or Weber, the two other German settlements in the county. In 1956 the congregation closed the church to merge with the St. John’s Lutheran Church at Weber. The Isanti County Historical Society acquired the church building from the Weber congregation in 1973. St. John’s is representative of the many rural churches scattered across Isanti County which served the important function of binding together the small ethnic communities comprising the county’s rural population. The surviving churches record the concentration areas of the ethnic groups and denominations. The extremely well-preserved condition of St. John’s make it link with the county’s German immigrant population.

The Spencer Brook School District No. 1 is primarily significant as a rare surviving structure associated with Spencer Brook, a community settled by New Englanders during the earliest phase of Isanti County’s development.

Settlers from New England were the first Euro-Americans to make permanent residences in Isanti County, preceding the better-known and more numerous Swedish immigrants who arrived in the area from the late 1860s to the 1890s. Spencer Brook was settled in the late 1850s, mostly by Mainites, who were engaged in lumbering. The village became the largest settlement of native born Americans in the county. The settlers organized the first rural school in the county in 1858. School enrollment outgrew the homes in which it was first held, and land was purchased in 1874 for a school site and the present building was constructed. The school has been closed since 1945, but the Spencer Brook Historical Association was formed in June 1969 for the purpose of restoring and preserving the schoolhouse.