Cottage Grove, Minnesota

Cottage Grove, Minnesota is a city in south Washington County, first settled in the 1840's. Prior to the city's incorporation in 1971, Cottage Grove could either refer specifically to the village itself or in a broader sense, the township in which it was contained. Two other villages were contained in Cottage Grove township: Langdon, which was slowly absorbed into suburban and commercial developments until it virtually ceased to exist, and Grey Cloud Island, which was separated into its own township in 1960undefined. For the first century of its existence, Cottage Grove was a small rural township with fewer than a thousand inhabitants, but the construction of suburban developments in the 1950's led to an explosion of population, which grew to over 13,000 within two decades.