36106 Old Homer Road
Winona, Homer Township, MN, USA

Willard Bunnell House

The Willard Bunnell House is a historic house museum in Homer, Minnesota, United States. The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973 for having state-level significance in the themes of architecture, commerce, and exploration/settlement. It was nominated for being Minnesota's first permanent house south of Saint Paul, as well as for its Gothic Revival architecture and association with brothers Willard (1814–1861) and Lafayette Bunnell (1824–1903), who helped develop the area during its frontier days. It is now managed by the Winona County Historical Society.

Description

The Willard Bunnell House is located three miles (4.8 km) east of Winona, Minnesota, overlooking U.S. Route 61 and the Mississippi River. It is a simple board-and-batten structure of unpainted eastern white pine. It is in the Carpenter Gothic style, with triangle-peaked windows and shutters, and carved bargeboards. However the house also has unusual features more typical of architecture in the Ohio and Lower Mississippi River Valleys, such as a two-story veranda and a flat-roofed rear wing.


History

Willard Bunnell was born in 1814 and rose from cabin boy to captain in the Great Lakes steamboat trade. He married Matilda Desnoyer in 1837 in Detroit, and became involved in efforts to open up the American frontier. He helped survey a military road from Detroit to Mackinaw, then began trading with the Ojibwe people around the Escanaba River.

In 1841 Willard and Matilda Bunnell, along with his younger brother Lafayette, traveled to the Upper Mississippi River, ultimately settling in Trempealeau, Wisconsin. From 1845 to 1846 Lafayette Bunnell was involved in logging and timber rafting on the Chippewa River, a short-lived effort that nevertheless presaged what would become the founding industry of the region. The brothers also helped build the first sawmill on the Eau Claire River, which would give rise to the city of Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

In the late 1840s Lafayette returned east and entered military service, while Willard remained on the Upper Mississippi. The land across the river was still the territory of the Dakota people and was closed to Euro-American settlement, but Willard anticipated a change and gained permission from Chief Wabasha III to build a log cabin on the west bank of the Mississippi.

In 1852, following the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux, much of Minnesota Territory opened to white settlement. Over the next few years Willard Bunnell helped found three new towns—Minneowah, Chatfield, and Homer—largely out of the expectation that Winona would fail because he judged the site prone to flooding. However floods did not trouble Winona and the community prospered, while Bunnell's alternatives remained small.

Sometime during this period Williard also built a new, grander home beside his and Matilda's original log cabin—the house that is still standing today. The house may have been unfinished when Willard died in 1861. His brother Lafayette, having served as a surgeon in the Mexican–American War, the Mariposa War, and the Civil War, and been involved in the first Euro-American exploration of the Yosemite Valley, took up residence in the house in 1865 and lived there until his own death in 1903.

National Register of Historic Places - Willard Bunnell House

Statement of Significance:

The Bunnell brothers, Willard Bradley Bunnell and Dr. Lafayette Houghton Bunnell, were the continuation of an old American family whose roots go deep into the expansion of the frontier in the 19th century. A distant relative, Edward Houghton of Vermont, obtained the title to the "Carver Tract11 in 1794, although its validity was never recognized. Dr. Douglas Houghton, a cousin of their mother, was a noted botanist and geologist who was instrumental in the charting of the south shore of Lake Superior. He also had accompanied Henry Schoolcraft as surveyor and surgeon to the headwaters of the Mississippi in 1832 and later became State Geologist for the State of Michigan.

Lafayette Bunnell obtained his taste for frontier life after accompanying his father, >r. Bradley Bunnell, from New York to Detroit in 1832, whereas a young man he became personally acquainted with many of the old French traders and where he heard of the new lake’s country, now Minnesota, from Colonel Josiah Snelling, after whom Fort Snelling in Minnesota was named.

Willard meanwhile had already lived many years on the Great Lakes, starting at age ten as a cabin boy and eventually becoming pilot of his own steamboat. In 1837 he married Matilda Desnoyer of Detroit and soon too became involved in the frontier life. He helped survey the military road from Detroit to Mackinaw and thereafter entered trading with the Chippewa around the present site of Escanaba, Michigan.

In 1841 Lafayette, Willard and his wife Matilda, set out for the new frontier then opening in the Mississippi Valley. Traveling by way of Green Bay through the old Fox-Wisconsin trade route, they met Francois La 'Bathe; La 'Bathe being the chief agent in the Mississippi and later Minnesota River valleys for the American Fur Company.

Upon entering the Upper Mississippi, they quickly developed friendships with Thomas Holmes, founder of present-day Janesville and Foutain City, Wisconsin and finally settling at James Reed's settlement, Trempeleau Wisconsin. This was most beneficial as Reed's wife was sister to the trader, La 'Bathe, and cousin to Wah-pa-sha, chief of the Sioux who at this time controlled the west bank of the river. Without her support Willard would have found it difficult to later obtain a trader's permit and establish a homestead on the west bank before the land was officially open to settlement in 1852, During the 1840s both brothers became involved in several significant events. In 1845 Lafayette became involved in one of the first attempts at commercialized rafting and logging in the Chippewa River Valley, establishing logging camps at the mouth of the Red Cedar River, the cut timber was floated down the Chippewa during high water in spring and then tied into large rafts at another camp at the river's mouth. From there they were rafted down the Mississippi to the sawmills at St. Louis. Willard Bunnell supervised this final stage. The enterprise lasted only from 1845 to 1846, but the operation predated the great rafting and logging operations that were to last through the turn of the century at the mouth of the Chippewa and from which the great Weyerhauser logging empire was to emerge. Also, during the summer of 1846, Willard and Lafayette, along with George and Simon Randall erected the first saw mill on the Eau Claire River. The Randalls who operated the mill were instrumental in establishing the logging operations at the mouth of the Eau Claire River from which the city of Eau Claire, Wisconsin grew.

After their short-lived enterprise, the brothers were to part ways. Lafayette returned to the east and soon after entered the Mexican War. He eventually found his way to California during the gold strike, serving with the Mariposa Battalion which discovered Yosemite. It was named at his suggestion after its inhabitants, the Yosemite Indians. He returned to Minnesota in 1865 after serving as a surgeon during the Civil War and resided at the Willard Bunnell House until his death in 1903.

Willard continued to live in the Mississippi Valley, and in 1848, assisted in the removal of the Winnebago Indians to the Long Prairie Reservation north of St. Paul.

Anticipating the opening of the west bank to white settlement, he obtained a trader's permit in 1849 to deal with chief Wah-pa-sha and commenced to construct the first permanent house in Indian territory in Minnesota, the present Willard Bunnell House.

In 1852 after several violent confrontations with the early settlers at Winona, Willard Bunnell co-founded the village of Minneowah. It was located approximately one mile west of his home and founded as an alternative landing site to Winona. He founded it on the assumption that Winona would flood at high water in spring and thus be exposed as a poor location. Winona, however, did not flood, and continued to prosper while Willard lost title to the village in a claim dispute. Minneowah eventually declined and disappeared.

In 1853 he was also a force in the establishment of Chatfield, Minnesota founding it as a replacement to Winona as the county seat of Fillmore County.

The effort was thwarted as the county was subdivided in 1854, creating Winona County and Winona was again established as the county seat.

His final attempt at town planning was the founding of Homer, Minnesota in 1855. He named it after his father's hometown in New York and he died there in his own house in 1861.

The Willard Bunnell House is significant because it is the first permanent house to be constructed in Minnesota below St. Paul. The house was the residence of two brothers whose life histories are a link not only to the opening of the Upper Mississippi Valley in the 1840s but also to the opening of the entire western frontier in mid-19th century America,