About Town - Fireworks

A Park & Rec Tour Destination For Kids
“The farm and stables were a place where kids enrolled
in Edina Park & Recreation playground programs got to
visit and see the horses at Valley View Stables. Some of
them took their first riding lesson on a real horse,” said
Ken Rosland, Edina’s former Park & Recreation Director
and City Manager.
“It could never happen today, but back then, the
youngsters also played horse-related games like
‘Cowboys and Indians.’ Kids (the ‘Indians’) threw tennis
balls at cowboys (stable employees on horseback.) If one
of the riders got hit with a tennis ball, he had to leave the
game,” Rosland recalled.
Marth Family Were Homesteaders Circa 1858
Caroline Marth Swanson, granddaughter of the original
Marth family settlers of Edina, wrote a letter (date
unknown) to the then-Village of Edina describing the
1,300 acres of land her ancestors had claimed in 1858.
“They built a little shack on Nine Mile Creek just east of
today’s pond in Braemar Park,” she said.
“The Marths’ property became a sheep ranch. The old
sheep barn was just east of the present-day Braemar Golf
Course,” Marth Swanson reported. “On March 3, 1917,
Carl Marth, grandson of the original settlers, married a
teacher who worked at the 1864 one-room Cahill School
[once located at today’s 70th Street and Cahill Road],” she
continued. (Cahill School was renovated and moved to its
current location in Tupa Park.)
Carl Marth’s grandfather’s home was torn down in 1919
by Dewey Hill, who had purchased the property. Rosland
noted, “Dewey Hill owned some property and lived out
there. He apparently was giving the village so much
trouble that they named the road [through the property]
Dewey Hill Road because it went into his place. Dan
Patch trained in the vicinity of Braemar Park. There was a
race track there when he was in this area.”
Who Was Dan Patch?
As Roger Harrold explained in his book about Braemar
Golf Course, “Any native Minnesotan over 60 knows that
Dan Patch was the world’s greatest harness racing horse.”
Dan Patch was a pacer. (Trotters were the other breed of
harness race horses.) Dan Patch broke world records at
least l4 times in the early 1900s.
“When the horse wasn’t on the road, from 1902, when
M.W. Savage bought him, until his death in 1916, it
lived in a plush, 20-by-20-foot stall in Savage, Minn. Dan
Patch never lost a race,” Harrold wrote. “Other owners
eventually refused to race their horses against him, and
Dan Patch spent the rest of his active career running
against the clock.”
“Horse stables were common to the Braemar Park
property and bridle paths were considered in early
designs for the golf course,” according to Rosland. But
apparently they never made it past the budget committee.
So why was Edina’s single-track railroad nicknamed
for a horse? M.W. Savage, Dan Patch’s owner and head
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