During the 1850s land boom in southern Minnesota, thirty-seven-year-old Jonathan Brown filed on land along the Cottonwood River in what is now Burnstown Township and chose a strong farming site on flat ground above the flood plain, protected on both sides from prairie fires, with large trees in the river bottom providing excellent building timber and firewood. Brown built a cabin that became a way stop for travelers on the New Ulm to Sioux Falls mail route, also called the Shetek Trail, which ran just south of his cabin, where people traveling to Shetek, Pipestone, the Great Oasis, or Sioux Falls could stop and rest. Jonathan Brown, his father Joseph, and his sister Oratia were killed in August 1862 while trying to escape to New Ulm, and their graves are in the Springfield City Cemetery west of this location.