After her father's death in 1914, Minnie Christina Peterson became the sole proprietor of the Watertown General Merchandise Store and was remembered as being far ahead of her time for a business woman. She died in a tragic car accident in 1931, and her small Swedish church could not hold all the people who wanted to attend her funeral. On block 48, on the east side of Lewis Avenue North, three residential buildings at 108, 112, and 200 stood on a low-lying strip of land between the south branch of the Crow River and Lewis Avenue and formed the surviving core of Watertown's initial settlement until 1990. They were relatively rare examples of Minnesota's mid-nineteenth-century vernacular residential architecture, and local sources indicated that 200 Lewis Avenue North served as a stopping point for stage coach traffic to Delano. On the east side of Lewis Avenue at 104, Watertown's fire department reflected another part of local history when, in 1925, farmers from the surrounding area presented the village with a 500-gallon-per-minute Universal pumper, the first known case of farmers buying a fire truck to fight rural fire calls and donating it to the village. Watertown's early development also included the opening of its first drug store by Isaac Lewis in 1856, a general merchandise business by Christian Barth in 1864, a brewery by Jacob Dietz in 1865, and the village's official incorporation in 1877.