William H. C. Folsom

William Henry Carman Folsom (1817–1900) was an American pioneer, lumberman and legislator of the upper Mississippi valley. Born in Maine, he went west in 1836 at nineteen to Prairie du Chien, then a military post, and settled in the St. Croix valley, where he ran sawmills and stores at Stillwater and Taylors Falls and served in the Minnesota territorial and state legislatures. From journals kept over half a century he wrote Fifty Years in the Northwest (1888), a county-by-county history of the Wisconsin and Minnesota frontier with hundreds of biographies of the settlers he had known. His house at Taylors Falls is preserved as a museum.