The RSA Logo

1. The Richfield 'R'

The stylized letter R at the heart of the logo was introduced by the city in 2015 in its own new logo and rebranding. This can now be seen throughout Richfield on signs, water towers, and on promotional materials. You can read more about the Richfield logo on the city website here: City of Richfield - New Logo.

2. A City "Under Glass"

In the late 1800s when Minneapolis was going through a population boom (the population quadrupled between 1880 and 1895), the produce business in Richfield boomed along with it. Many gardeners set up greenhouses and grew produce to send north to Minneapolis. Some of the most successful Richfield gardeners, Henry Bachman and J. Emil Wagner, still have their greenhouses operating today (though they are both now in the Minneapolis city limits.) A promotional booklet from Richfield in the 1920s proclaimed the city had "the greatest system of garden truck greenhouses in the northwest - having about 300,000 feet under glass."

The angled pattern at the top of the RSA logo is inspired by the rows of greenhouses that used to cover so much of our city.

3. Our Grid Landscape

From the very beginning, Richfield was a farming community. As settlers came they acquired square plots of land where they built homes and farms and worked the land. Plat maps of Richfield, like this one from 1913, show how the land was parceled out into squares, and if you look at Richfield today, our city has not strayed far from this pattern... You can even see how our major streets today were defined by the boundaries between farmers over 100 years ago.

The checked pattern on the left of the logo is a reflection of our city viewed from above - whether in 1900 or today.

4. From Fields to Thoroughfares

And finally, the stripes at the bottom-left of the logo honor our farming past, representing long rows of crops in the fields that once covered Richfield. They also honor our present - the 6 stripes are for the main north-south thoroughfares that help our city to function today: Penn, Lyndale, Nicollet, Portland, 12th, and Cedar.

If you found this bit of Richfield history interesting, spend some time with the Richfield Historical Society. Visit them on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons at 69th and Lyndale There are many more stories to tell about our city, and you can find a great many of them there. I also encourage you to pick a copy of Richfield, Minnesota's Oldest Suburb, by Frederick L. Johnson, which was published by the Richfield Historical Society. It's something every Richfield coffee table should have! Get one from the RHS gift shop or online.

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