History
At almost 36.0 square miles in size, Woodbury is a direct descendant of one of the congressional townships that Minnesota Territory was divided into when the territory was ceded by the Native Americans of the United States and "opened to settlement." Woodbury was originally named Red Rock, but was renamed Woodbury after Levi Woodbury, the first justice of the Supreme Court of the United States to attend law school, realized that another Red Rock existed in Minnesota. When first settled in 1844, the land was mostly wood but was converted to farmland. The township government was organized in 1858, and the first town hall built in 1876.
The first suburban housing development began in 1955, and the city has seen an increasing level of metropolitan expansion as the farmland has given way to developments and shopping malls.
Read more about this topic: Woodbury, Minnesota
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The principle office of history I take to be this: to prevent virtuous actions from being forgotten, and that evil words and deeds should fear an infamous reputation with posterity.”
—Tacitus (c. 55–117)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)