Plymouth History Center

This week’s article comes from Club Y.E.S volunteer Breanna Smida. Plymouth, Minnesota is full of a rich and diverse culture that has beenformed over hundreds of years. Not only does Plymouth have such adiverse culture, but it also has a multitude of various historical sites andactivities that all help form the culture and community even further.An institution that has been around for a long time and added to thisdiverse culture in many different ways is the Wayzata Public SchoolDistrict, which…

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This week’s article comes from Club Y.E.S. volunteer Kompal. The aromatic scent of luscious herbs, vibrant ponds filled with dazzling goldfish, and the arcadian feeling of sitting on the swing in front of the fountain in Millenium Garden is a delightful thought for many. A quick two minutes away from a large area of fields and a children’s park, Millennium Garden has become a space for people of all ages to enjoy. Featuring an exquisite labyrinth, a number of tranquil…

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Our next Club Y.E.S. post comes from Divya Godithi. Hilde performance center is an excellent site to visit here in Plymouth, Minnesota. The former Mayor of Plymouth, Al Hilde Jr. and his wife Jayne, made a $1 million donation to create this magnificent performance center at 3500 Plymouth Blvd. Hilde performance is an open air performance center located right next to Lifetime Fitness and behind Plymouth City Hall and Cub foods. Al Hilde was Plymouth’s mayor from 1968-1978 and took…

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Our first Club Y.E.S. contributor is Aneesh Sakrahalli, whose article below explores business development in Plymouth. The economical development of Plymouth is rooted throughout different ages of time and motifs that pictures the city as unique. Plymouth can be traced back to the pre-Colombian period, 1400-1500 AD; the original inhabitants were the Dakota, and they lived at the north end of Medicine Lake. Primarily, they worked together in fulfilling needs in their society. However, they traded with British fur companies…

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The Plymouth Historical Society is very excited and honored to have recently had volunteers from Wayzata Highschool’s Club Y.E.S. (Youth Extending Service) program contributing to the Plymouth History Museum. Through distanced, virtual projects through the month of February, students provided support for a range of our museum programs, from collection photo editing to blog post writing. We will be featuring writing from these talented and insightful students in the upcoming weeks, so keep a look-out for their works soon! If…

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As we have explored in our past two posts, many connections can be made through the very name of a place. It can draw associations to far away locales. It can remind an area of its historic roots. It can also act as a form of historical amnesia; as a place is re-named, its former iterations and associations can be lost or forgotten. We explored how Plymouth was briefly named Medicine Lake, which was thought to be an association to…

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As many of us have adjusted our holiday plans for 2020, holiday celebrations at the Plymouth Historical Society looked a little different this year as well. In place of our usual Old Fashioned Christmas event, we assembled kits for families to experience at home. Kits cost $10 to cover the cost of supplies and are available through the end of December. If you haven’t had a chance to pick one up, you can still do so through the end of…

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In our journey to commemorate the naming of Plymouth, it is now time to re-center on our very own Plymouth, Minnesota. Returning to Upham’s text, the entry reads: Plymouth, first settled in October, 1853, organized May 11, 1858, took the name of its village previously platted on Parker’s lake, in 1856; but the village was only of short duration, in contrast with the township name, which, however, some of the settlers at first wished to change to Medicine Lake. Like…

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The City of Plymouth was recently awarded a Minnesota Legacy Small Grant for the purposes of creating a Collection Storage Plan for the Plymouth History Museum. The grant enables us to bring in an outside consultant to assist with planning next steps for the collection as part of the recent building works and collection packing and inventory. The plan will be based on the National Park Service’s Museum Handbook standards for museum collections and is meant to ensure we are…

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Have you ever wondered how the City of Plymouth received its name? One of the best sources for learning about the many place names throughout our state is Warren Upham’s Minnesota Place Names: A Geographical Encylopedia, originally published in 1920. Upham’s text notes Plymouth, MN is only one of many Plymouths within the United States. This fact was explored in a 2014 Boston Globe article, which notes 30 locales around the country share the name. (Fun fact: our Plymouth is…

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