The task of seeing a doctor today can be done as easily as a few keystrokes on our computers, but in the late 1800s it was a very different story. With bad roads, no weather forecast or warning alerts to speak of, and births often taking place at home rather than the comfort of a hospital maternity ward, what tends to be an otherwise routine occurrence today, could be rather harrowing in pioneer days.

For a time, most newborn residents in Cottage Grove were brought into the world with the help of one man, Dr. Arthur Henry Steen. How much did it cost to deliver a baby in the early days you might wonder? Well, only $3!

Dr. Steen arrived in the Village of Cottage Grove in 1874 around the age of 24. With the Village then contained within what today is known as East or Old Cottage Grove while the railroad town of Langdon (the site of much of modern Cottage Grove) was located further west, Dr. Steen rented an office in Old Cottage Grove for a short time until a pioneer farmer, Samuel Furber, offered to build the doctor his own office on the corner of his property. This little office would serve the physician for the next 53 years.

In the early days he didn’t have enough money for a buggy and harness, so he invested in a saddle horse to see patients located too far to walk to. Eventually because of the countless miles required he needed more than one horse so the other could rest. Eventually, Dr. Steen purchased one of the first automobiles that would travel on Cottage Grove roads, but he would still use horses hitched to a sleigh for winter travel.

In 1887 he married Eva Perkins of Denmark Township, then 26 years old. The couple would have no children of their own, but when Eva’s brother and his wife died the couple took in their three children. Eva, her parents and siblings came originally from Ontario Canada, moving to the Red Rock and Newport areas of Minnesota before she married Dr. Steen.

Meanwhile, Dr. Steen would see patients in more than Cottage Grove, treating folks across Washington County in places like Oakdale, Landfall, Denmark, Afton, Newport, Grey Cloud and Woodbury. And while city-treated water makes once-feared illnesses like cholera and scarlet fever a thing of the past in the United States, that wasn’t the case back in pioneer days. With medical knowledge nowhere near where it is today, a widespread belief in ‘miasma’ (bad air) as the cause of disease rather than germs meant that epidemics and the local ‘sick list’ of those in recovery were a common occurrence. But where sickness and death threatened patients, Dr. Steen would answer the call.

One fall, typhoid fever spread through the country and the doctor had more than 40 cases to care for. He also dealt with diptheria and the 1918 influenza epidemic. Dr. Steen told the 1927 Chronicler that it gave him the hardest-sustained battle he ever experienced. For three months he never found time to eat at home and his sleep for the most part was had in occasional naps.

Never retiring, Dr. Arthur Steen practiced medicine until the day he died on November 14, 1928. He was 78 years old, saved countless lives and delivered over 5,000 babies. He is buried next to his wife Eva in the Cottage Grove cemetery. Dr. Steen’s Memorial ID on Find a Grave is 34997370, while that of his wife Eva is 34997371. Born in 1861, Eva Steen survived her husband by several years, dying in 1935.