The First Garst Store
The
old town of Coon Rapids, founded in 1855 by
Obadiah Niles, consisted at first of a mill, a blacksmith shop and a store on the middle
fork of the Raccoon River. In 1865 it was laid out as a town proper. Edward Garst,
Roswell’s father, joined the small but growing community in 1869, founding the first general store in the village, supplying
groceries, dry goods, clothing, hardware, and a few drugs and remedies.
The Old Mill
In 1882, when the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul railroad pushed
westward just south of the old town, the 54 inhabitants relocated their
homes and businesses to the present site of the town, whose population jumped to 600 in
one year. In 1883 Coon Rapids had a grain elevator, two banks, two hotels, a new school
and church and a variety of businesses, including the expanded and modernized Garst Store.
Surveying the town in 1883, S.D. Henry, publisher of the Coon Rapids Enterprise, saw
"no cause for even a whisper of doubt as to its future."
Main Street 1914 
In spite of severe
Garst Store Interior 1914
damage from a tornado in 1886, the town kept growing until it leveled off
at a little more than a thousand during the 1890s. Efforts to bring a north-south railroad
through the town failed, but the town prospered quietly as
the hub of a fertile farming area. In 1904, Coon Rapids had 53 business
establishments, an opera house, a waterworks, an electric light plant, and a telephone
exchange. By 1907 the Garst Store had electric lights, a vacuum-tube cash handling system
and had built a large addition.
The farm crisis of the
20s and the full-fledged Depression of the 30s put great stress on the town, but in 1930 Edward Garst’s son Roswell and Charley Thomas founded the
Garst and Thomas Hybrid Seed Corn Company, which by the end of the 30s
would transform the economy of Coon Rapids and of the western corn belt. Garst, who had
met Henry A. Wallace in Des Moines during the 1920s, received a franchise to make the
final cross between parent seeds and sell Wallace’s genetically controlled seed to
highly suspicious farmers.
Garst’s
innovative sales techniques made a significant contribution to the
acceptance of hybrid seed, marked the beginning of his distinguished career in the
forefront of agricultural technology, and brought a series of visitors to Coon Rapids.
Garst’s most famous pupil was Nikita Khrushchev, who visited the Garst Farm in 1959.
In the early 80s, the
Garst and Thomas seed company became
Garst
Seed Company, and it is now owned by Syngenta.
The Garst Store closed in 1995, after 126 years of
continuous trading. The town of Coon Rapids continues to be the hub of a fertile farming
area.
