Welcome to the Big Lake History Website!
By Jana Harrer
The Big Lake History Facebook group was created in August of 2017 and soon thereafter there were so many comments, shared memories and snapshots of the past that Scott Zettervall and myself determined that we needed a better place to save the information collected. Our goal for this site is to create feature stories which compiled the information we gathered and build on the information gathered in the History of Big Lake book.
My parents, Cal and Dorothy Hinrichs, took a lot of photos and slides throughout the fifties. I spent almost two years digitizing and keywording all the photos I could find. As I was doing that I talked to many family and friends to put names with the people in the photos, which lead me to an interest in ancestry research.
In addition to online research I paid a visit to the Sherburne County Historical Society center in Becker, MN and found it fascinating. The ancestry information was limited to online resources one could get if you own a computer. So, while I was there I wondered what was available on Big Lake. Shockingly, there were only 6 Big Lake High School yearbooks on the shelves. Turning to newspaper archives I was underwhelmed by a drawer full of random newspaper clippings and rolls and rolls of microfilm. The Big Lake I know has lots of history. Where was it?
So while it began with thoughts of sharing my parents slides with the community, the idea morphed into a quest to preserve our town’s history or at least find it!
There have been three published books that I have found that write of Big Lake History:
- Rod Hunt’s A Boy’s Guide to Big Lake Minnesota and Other Stuff
- the Big Lake Historical Society’s book History of Big Lake.
- Saron’s 100 year
In the forward of the BIg Lake History the authors wrote a couple of things that resonated and motivated me to start collecting stories. First, they wrote they felt that in the very early years, Big Lake was a rest stop on the way to other parts of Minnesota and that it lacked the generational family histories that other nearby towns they researched had. Secondly, in an effort to gather stories in 1993 for the book the authors solicited information by advertising in the local newspapers and by speaking at community civic groups.
Fast forward to 2017 and now we have the ability to reach a large audience and for a far more sustained period of time through social media.
Big Lake may have begun as a rest stop, but we are not that anymore. All places have history and we are a 120 year old community where people have lived their lives. Let’s make sure our history is there for younger generations by all working together to pull out old photographs, share stories and document the past.
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