Most current chatter here focuses on the future, and for good reason; there’s a lot to talk about in this fast-growing city. Recently, though, a handful of people connected to Rochester started using social media to look to the past — and that handful quickly turned into a throng of thousands.

Old Rochester Minnesota, a Facebook group dedicated to sharing old pictures and memories of the Med City, has seen its membership skyrocket in recent months. The page was founded in 2014 and now boasts more than 6,300 members (roughly the population of Rochester in 1900), multiple thousands of those coming in the second half of 2019 alone.

The group helps high school classmates, old co-workers and Rochester expatriates reconnect and reminisce about their favorite pastimes from a bygone era. Dozens of stories are shared on a weekly basis, simultaneously making the group a time capsule and reunion.

Mark Youngblood, page founder and one of two current administrators, doesn’t actually live in Rochester. The White Bear Lake resident travels across the upper Midwest in pursuit of old glass bottles, buried in the ground where forgotten buildings once stood. Youngblood founded the page after finding some antique bottles during a dig in Plainview, a rural community 30 minutes northeast of Rochester.

A typical post on the Old Rochester Minnesota Facebook page

“I wanted to share some stuff from the pick, so I started Old Rochester,” said Youngblood.

A group that large needs a team of managers to vet potential members (users have to approve a connection to Rochester before being accepted as a member) and keep potential advertisements from sneaking in. Youngblood says it can be a hard job for himself and fellow admin Kevin Reynolds, a Rochester native who joined the group a couple years after its creation.

“Sometimes it gets to be a lot of work,” he said. “But lots of people help on the site… it’s a group effort.”

Youngblood had a hand in creating other similar groups, such as Historic Minneapolis Minnesota (~7,000 members) and Old St. Paul, Minnesota, which boasts over 31,000 members. The general idea across all three groups is the same: share pictures and stories from a certain area and let people use the comments to chime in with their own memories.

Shared photos spark conversations that can last for hours and include dozens of people — some who currently live in Rochester, and some who spent time here in the past but moved elsewhere.

A recipe shared in the group from the former Barlow Foods grocery store

“That’s the magic of Facebook,” said Youngblood. “You can be 2,000 miles away and communicate within a nanosecond with someone in Rochester or their hometown. A lot of people make connections, long-lost connections that they wouldn’t be able to make otherwise.”

With the page “growing by leaps and bounds” in the past few months according to Youngblood, the old places and experiences of Rochester are being shown in a new light.

“A lot of people love Rochester’s history, I can tell you that,” he said.

Isaac Jahns is a Rochester native and a 2019 graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism. He reports on politics, business and music for Med City Beat.

Cover photo comes from a collection of historic Rochester images restored by local photographer Dean Riggott. You can view the entire gallery on his website.