The Kinbrae post office opened in 1883, the earliest record of the town by name. Three smaller post offices, Creswell (1873), Airlie (1879) and De Forest (1882), opened inside today’s city and later closed.
First census: 19 in 18802020 census: 10143 years
Founding year: the first Kinbrae post office (Blevins & Helbock, CC0).The full story ↓
What stands out about Kinbrae’s past
Read from the archive, the National Register and the record. The page puts what stands out first.
Site selections: In the year 1879, the Southern Minnesota Railroad began building a route from Heron Lake, to Fulda. A rail station was proposed for the Graham Lakes region, and the site selected was briefly named Airlie in honor of David Ogilvy, the 10th Earl of Airlie. The Earl was president of the Dundee Improvement company, a Scottish company formed for the purpose of founding a town in southwest Minnesota. In September and October 1879, Oglivy's company built a steam elevator with a capacity of 16,000 bushels, a hotel, and a general store building in Airlie. The Dundee Improvement company played no role in founding the nearby town of Dundee. In fact, the towns of Kinbrae (Airlie) and Dundee, though separated by a mere 1/2 mile, were rivals, built along the roads of competing rail lines.
Passages that mention Kinbrae, cut from the printed page as they were published.
An illustrated history of Nobles County, Minnesota1908 · page 384Read the page →
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stead claim of B. W. Woolstencroft on section 26, proved up on it, and continuously resided there until 1903. He then moved to the village of Kinbrae, where he has since lived a retired life. WILLIAJI TENTLER, real estate dealer and mayor of Lismore, is an old settler of northwestern Nobles county, where he has
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An illustrated history of Nobles County, Minnesota1908 · page 259Read the page →
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a station on the Pipestone branch of the Omaha railroad and is eight miles northwest from Heron Lake. Prom its old time rival, Kinbrae, which is on the Milwaukee road, it is only a mile and a half. The town had a population of 182 in 1905. All lines of business usually represented in villages of the size
Text read by machine from the scan; it may contain errors.
Scans and text from the Internet Archive. Books published in 1930 or earlier, which are in the public domain.
Timeline
Kinbrae, 1873 to 1970
Woven from the archive, old maps, post office records, the National Register and the people born here.
Founding dates: Wikidata, Wikipedia, the U.S. post office records of Blevins & Helbock (CC0) and the Census. Homes by year built: Census ACS 2020–24. National Register of Historic Places: National Park Service (list of May 22, 2026). Old photos, postcards and papers: Wikimedia Commons, the Library of Congress and other public archives, credited on each item’s page. Maps: U.S. Geological Survey historical topographic maps (via Esri) and Sanborn fire-insurance maps (Library of Congress). History text and census tables: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0). Places that used to be: USGS Geographic Names Information System (2021). How TownRatings grades history →
From Wikipedia, U.S. Geological Survey historical maps, U.S. Census counts (via Wikipedia), the US Post Offices dataset (Blevins & Helbock), the USGS Geographic Names Information System and old county and town histories (Internet Archive). Archive images are copied here with their credits and licenses, shown on each photo’s page. Refreshed monthly.
