Nestled in the heart of Minnesota, nestled between the Twin Cities and Minneapolis - St. Paul metro area, the city was home to 8,000 people when my family arrived in 1954. When I arrived, it was in a small town of just over 1,500 people, and before the Great Depression it was my home for only about four years.
In the age of the Homestead Act, there was a time when you could claim as much of your land as you wanted, and there were no restrictions. There was no limit to the number of hectares of land that could be claimed as free for you.
More people joined a company called the National Colony Organization, and in the same year a company was founded to find settler colonies. Regular passenger train service to Worthington began on 29 April 1872 and the first train was begged with the first settlers of the National Colony. Meanwhile, the company, which was based in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and other states, established its first station in Worcester that same year.
The colony of the National Colony was to be a place where evangelical Methodists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists and Baptists could live free from the sin of alcohol. The colony itself is famous for being the first church in the United States and the only one of its kind in North America, and it was the site of a church for the First Baptist Church in Worthington, Minnesota in 1872.
Not to mention the leisure activities, which included ice skating in winter and ice skating in summer. In winter, baseball, football, tennis, basketball, football, hockey and baseball were organized, and in winter basketball and football.
Worthington is home to a number of research companies actively discovering new life sciences technologies, as well as several manufacturing companies engaged in the construction of homes, commercial buildings and plastic products. Located in a community of more than 1,000 inhabitants and with an annual income of over $1.5 million, it attracts large companies involved in processing, research and shipping to settle in this community. It has one of the largest growing hospitals in North America, the University of Minnesota Medical Center, and it has the second largest medical school in Minnesota and the third largest hospital in America.
The city of Worthington has behaved in a way that reflects its status as one of the most environmentally friendly communities in the state of Minnesota. It is also aligned with Lake Superior National Wildlife Refuge, where herons have gathered as industrial railroad and agricultural practices have taken their toll.
The surrounding plains have been the land of the Sioux for centuries, and the prairie was translated into the surviving Indian names of the town of Worthington. The nomenclature is borrowed from the name of a nearby town, the city of St. Paul, Minnesota, in the US state of Minnesota. It is the largest city in Minnesota with a population of more than 2,000 people and an area of 1.5 million acres.
I am a member of the Congregational Church, like many who converted to Methodism or Presbyterianism during the Second Great Awakening, many of whom became Baptists after coming to present-day Minnesota. I have parents and grandparents who moved to the region from upstate New York in the mid-19th century.
None of this is the city's fault, of course, but the problems of overpopulation, combined with land scarcity, have arisen in all six New England states. In this atmosphere, settlers with ties to the national colony also arrived in large numbers, and some of them were teetotallers. And who can blame soybeans, which are themselves more than soybeans, for being a bigger problem in Minnesota than in New York or New Jersey?
Founded in 1870 as a railway station for irrigation, Worthington was an agricultural community almost from the beginning. In my youth, the city was still a beehive, but today it is more of a city than a farming town with its own schools, churches and hospitals.
One of the immigrants I interviewed was a woman named Teresa who came to Worthington from Mexico, and Lisbeth Castillo who came to Worthingston from Nicaragua 21 years ago, built a cowboy boot business, then went to college, returned to Nicaragua, and later returned to Worcester and built the cowboy boot business. Lately, under Donald Trump, I feel like a cultural crossroads in America. A young woman named Andrea Duarte Alonso has collected and published stories about her experiences in the city, in part to stand up to Trump, who she says helped spread fear and hatred when he called Mexicans "rapists" in 2016. My daughter could have had surgery for a carcinogenic mole, but she ended up staying.
I met my mother in Norfolk, Virginia, married in 1945, served on a destroyer in Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and served in the destroyer in Okinawa. For reasons that are still unclear to me and my mother, we set out to live on corn and soybeans in southern Minnesota. Our family moved to the small rural town of Worthington, where my father became a regional manager of a life insurance company. Finding work in Worcester was easier than in most places in the state, although pay was a problem. On the other hand, Worhington's average weekly wage of $619 was higher than that of most surrounding communities in Minnesota and the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.