This town of 700 people offers extraordinary inducements to the pleasure seeker as well as the homeseeker; it has advantages which cannot be had elsewhere.  The best of hotel accommodations are to be found here, the best hunting, fishing, boating and bathing.  The Battle Lake country is the most picturesque in the state, and visitors return home and speak of it as the Garden of Eden, the queen among Minnesota’s ten thousand lakes.  Battle Lake is located on the Northern Pacific railway, 185 miles northwest of St. Paul, and twenty miles from Fergus Falls, the county seat.  It contains three churches, opera house, flour mill of 200 barrels per day capacity, four elevators, one creamery, two cheese factories, brickyard, one high school, eight grades, a first-class hotel, two banks and a wide-awake weekly newspaper, the Review, Harvy Johnson editor and publisher.  Farm lands are comparatively cheap in price around this section and are rapidly being settled with stock farmers from Southern Minnesota.  A few of the prominent business men as follows are building up the city and are doing all in their power to settle this part of the county:

Plyn A. Aldrich is proprietor of the Battle Lake hotel, the first-class hotel of the city, and will answer all questions in relation to this section.

E. A. Everts is the lumber dealer of the city and has been in this county since 1871.

  1. Anderson is the wine merchant of the city and has been here for twenty-four years. 

O. C. Nelson runs a very fine department store and has been in business for twenty-one years, also has an interest in the city meat market.

M. S. Jones is the town’s physician and surgeon, and also runs the main drug store of the town and is the representative of Otter Tail county.

H. C. Head is cashier of the Otter Tail County bank and R. F. McClellan president.  This bank does a fine business.

Thorvald A. Olson runs the harness business of the town and is a rustler for business, being here twenty years.

A. C. Hatch, one of the busy men of the town, runs the main hardware store, also farm implement and machine shop, grain elevator and manufacturer of brick; came here in 1881.

Winslow’s bank, one of the leading banks, does a very nice business and will soon be in its new home, a three-story brick.  W. L. Winslow, president.

Source:
The Saint Paul Globe
Monday Morning, November 2, 1903
Volume XXVI, Number 306, Page 3