The village of Brook Park supported a small but vital Jewish community for a brief period in the mid-1890s. That community dispersed after the Great Hinckley Fire destroyed the village on September 1, 1894, just months after many of the immigrants had arrived.
Starting in 1893, the Kelsey-Markham Land Company recruited immigrants to Pokegama, the site of a former lumber camp. The company sold land for eight dollars per acre. Its co-owner, Chauncey Almer Kelsey, was a doctor, businessman, entrepreneur, and land speculator who envisioned developing the township into an idyllic village.
Kelsey was instrumental in changing the township’s name from Pokegama to Brook Park—a name that he thought would attract more buyers. He then moved to recruit new residents, including Jewish families he met while attending the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. Kelsey himself arrived in Brook Park with his family in the summer of 1894.
Jewish families started arriving in Brook Park in 1893, some via indirect routes. Samuel and Anna Misel left Russia in 1892 for Argentina, where their daughter, Lily, was born. They then moved on to the United States, where their son, Henry, was born in St. Paul on May 15, 1894. Samuel Misel was nineteen years old and Anna eighteen, making them the youngest of the new Jewish residents of Brook Park.
Anna shared a mother’s maiden name, Reznick, with Sophie Finer, indicating a possible familial relationship. Ben and Sophie Finer had emigrated from Courland, Latvia, around 1885. They resided in New Jersey and Illinois before moving to Minnesota in 1893. Their third son, Sollie, was born in Brook Park on May 19, 1894.
By 1894, the Jewish enclave at Brook Park consisted of eighteen adults and seventeen children (thirty-four Russian immigrants and one German American). The village was described as having “no police court, jail or saloon, or abominations known in modern crowded city life.” By the fall of 1894, its total population was approximately 135.
The Jewish families’ next-door neighbors included Mary Amanda Braman and Warren Braman, a Civil War veteran and cooper who had come to Brook Park from Ashland, Minnesota, in 1893. Along with Kelsey and others, Braman was an investor in Brook Park’s newly constructed boarding house.
On the morning of September 1, 1894, a fire flared up to the south of Brook Park—part of what became known as the Great Hinckley Fire. By 2 pm, it had reached the village. Braman saved many of the villagers by leading them to a pond next to a lumber mill by Pokegama Creek, where they stood in a pool of water out of reach of the flames. According to Finer family oral history, Sophie Finer and her two youngest sons, David and Sollie, were among those who sought refuge in the pond. David, age three, drowned while Sophie clutched Sollie to her chest. Ben and Louis Finer, age five, survived in another location, though Louis received burns on his legs.
A total of twenty-six Brook Park residents died in the fire—many of them because they failed to reach Pokegama Creek. Warren Braman’s twenty-seven-year-old son, Jay, was among the dead. Rescuers identified his body by his new pair of boots.
The surviving villagers spent two days sheltering in train cars before being transported to Mora and from there to St. Paul. Governor Knute Nelson’s Commission for Relief of Fire Sufferers assisted survivors with food, shelter, clothing, and transportation.
Five of the Jewish men stayed in Pine County after the fire and rebuilt their homes. Joe Coblin and native New Yorker Jake Greenberg received construction materials and are found in the 1895 census residing in Brook Park. Abe Chapman and Reuben Osternick, who had families still living in Europe, along with Israel Rosenberg, obtained acreage north of Hinckley, where they rebuilt and resided for approximately one year. Joe Chipris is identified in the 1895 census as a resident of Duluth and employee of Bloom’s Furniture store.
By 1897, all of the Jewish residents of Brook Park had dispersed. The Finer, Misel, Shapiro and Raphael families, who had come from Chicago, returned home one month after the fire. The
Israel Rosenberg and Charles Smith families became permanent residents of St. Paul’s West Side neighborhood. Abe Chapman moved to Minneapolis where he married and started a new family while Reuben Osterneck relocated to Pennsylvania and arranged to bring his entire family from Ukraine.