Built of native limestone and completed in 1860 after Wasioja's citizens agreed to provide the Free Will Baptists with a seminary building, the Minnesota Seminary opened that November with more than 300 students and by 1861 had been renamed Northwestern College, offering classes from primary to collegiate levels. In 1862 Wasioja was a growing town with a dozen stores, a hotel, a flour mill, and surrounding farms and quarries, but the Civil War altered its future when Captain James George, a veteran of the Mexican War, asked students to volunteer and, led by Professor Clinton A. Cilley, young men marched to George's law office and enlisted. Organized as Company C of the 2nd Minnesota, eighty young men left Wasioja for war, and just over a year later at Snodgrass Hill near Chickamauga they stopped the Confederate advance at great cost, with only 25 returning with life and limb intact. The town never recovered from that loss. The school continued with enrollment cut in half, lost Free Will Baptist sponsorship in 1868, reopened as Groveland Seminary, closed in 1872, reopened in 1873 under the Wesleyan Methodist Conference, and finally closed in 1894. A fire destroyed the building in 1905, leaving the ruins that stand today, which Reverend A. B. Gould, a graduate and instructor, acquired and preserved before his heirs deeded the site to Dodge County as a public park.