Maine immigrants, with their occupational interests in mill sites and timberlands, did not choose life on the farm as often as other Northeasterners. But the lush farmlands of Richfield soon lured Maine settlers with interests in agriculture. By 1860 the community included prominent Mainites Jesse N. and Lucy Richardson, James and Sarah Pratt, Jeremiah and Hanna Parker, William and Mary Day, George and Bethea Drew, and the Couillards, Dunsmoors and Godfreys.
Many of Richfield’s first settlers from Maine originally came to St. Anthony on the east side of the Mississippi where they could purchase government land. Franklin Steele recruited Ard Godfrey to build his St. Anthony sawmill in 1847. He also hired Maine lumbermen to procure building material for the project.
In 1854 Cornelius Couillard took his family from Frankfort, on Maine’s Penobscot River, to St. Anthony. He was to work on the new suspension bridge that Steele, Henry Sibley and others were building to connect St. Anthony with the future site of Minneapolis. Both Godfrey and Couillard later moved their families to the future Richfield.
Couillard and his wife, Nancy, took advantage of the preemption law by filing a claim late in 1854. Their two oldest children guarded the family plot until winter was nearly over. At that point, son Adelbert later remembered, his father and older brother hauled building materials from St. Paul to St. Anthony and then on to Richfield. They reached their claim at nine in the evening. Adelbert held a lantern while his father erected a shanty twelve feet square. The entire family joined them the next day, and another small building went up. The Couillards lived in those rough cottages while constructing their house. Their farmstead was between the future Portland and Lyndale Avenues in the area of 70th Street.
Setters from Maine made up 35 percent of the total number of U.S.-born adults (eighteen years old or older) in Richfield in 1860. New York Immigrants, at 21 percent, were a notable but distant second. Maine’s 120 and New York’s 74 adults made up more than half the American-born newcomers in the town. Fifty-eight immigrants from Ireland represented just under half of the 119 adults from other nations. Just three of Richfield’s citizens had been born in Minnesota-Philander Prescott’s Mdewakanton Dakota wife, Mary, who was Chief Cloud Man’s daughter, and their children, Lawrence and Julia.