Eden Prairie, MN news and local guide

An 1851 treaty opened the land west of the Mississippi to settlement, and many early farmhouses survive, several on the National Register of Historic Places, among them the house that the Irish-born John Cummins and his wife, Mattie, built in 1880, where he experimented with apples and grapes that could survive Minnesota's climate. In 1853 John H. McKenzie and the territorial secretary Alexander Wilkins platted the town of Hennepin along the Minnesota River, but poor terrain for shipping crops left it eclipsed by other towns, and it soon vanished from maps. The writer Elizabeth F. Ellet named the area Eden in 1853, admiring its beautiful prairie, and the town board first met in a log schoolhouse on May 11, 1858, the day Minnesota became a state. For most of its history Eden Prairie was a slow-growing farming village on the far southwest edge of the Twin Cities, growing from about 739 people in 1880 to 2,000 in 1960. Flying Cloud Airport, opened in 1946, was the first sign of major development. Eden Prairie became a village in 1962 and a city in 1974, and Interstate 494 and the Eden Prairie Center mall raised its profile in the mid-1970s. Sources Wikipedia: Eden Prairie, Minnesota