City Square in Chaska has long been the community’s gathering place and heart. The land was set aside for public purpose in 1852 in the original plat. Early settlers found six earthen mounds there, built by persons known as the Mound Builders who preceded the Dakota Indians; originally six circular mounds, they were variously thought to be for protection, burial, or worship. Some were removed in creating streets, but the remainder are still visible, indicating the immediate area was inhabited before 1769, when Chaska’s recorded history begins. The park hosted weekly summer band concerts, Memorial Day programs, and community celebrations, and some form of bandstand has stood at its center since 1889; the present gazebo was built in 1985. Nearby, Carver County was established in 1855 and named for Jonathon Carver, who explored the area in 1767/1768. Chaska became the county seat in 1856, and in 1857 Shaska Co. donated six lots for county offices. Work began on the Carver County Courthouse in 1858, and it served until its demolition in 1965; a scaffold built on the courthouse and jail property in 1902 was used for Carver County’s only hanging. A new County Government Center on Beech Street replaced the courthouse in 1965. Chaska’s first City Hall occupied the second floor of a brick fire station erected in 1883 on Third Street between Chestnut and Walnut, above which rose a sixty foot hose tower. Joseph Ess, a wagon maker and blacksmith, founded the Chaska Foundry and Machine Shop in 1886 at Third and Walnut, supplying the town’s brick manufacturers and producing soap kettles, sleighs, iron fencing, and manhole covers; the business remained in the Ess family for more than one hundred years before the foundry was demolished in 1987 and replaced by Town Square Apartments. The wider history of Chaska includes Dakota Indians in the Big Woods, fur traders in the 1760's, the establishment of the townsite by Thomas Andrew Holmes in 1851, settlement in the mid-1850's largely by immigrants from Germany, and an economy shaped by timber, clay, and agricultural processing. Chaska’s population remained about 2,000 until the 1960's, when metropolitan expansion brought new land, jobs, and residents, while local government and residents continued working to preserve the city’s heritage and small town sense of community. Other nearby landmarks include the C.P. Klein Mansion, built in 1911 and used as City Hall from 1967 to 1988; the C.H. Klein Mansion, built in 1910 and later donated for public use as the City Library from 1967 to 1988; Park School, built in 1893 on the site of a Moravian academy and used first as a school and later as City Hall, Library, and Fire Station until it was razed in 1967; and the Chaska Moravian Church, founded by families from western Pennsylvania in 1858, whose present building was erected in 1889.