Otter Tail County experienced its worst natural disaster when two tornadoes devastated Fergus Falls on June 22, 1919. Sixty people died, hundreds were injured and scores of buildings were destroyed or damaged beyond repair including the 1879 county courthouse.

Less than three weeks after the devastation, a meeting was held in Battle Lake to organize an attempt to remove the county seat from Fergus Falls. According to the Battle Lake Review, “Fergus Falls was too busy extracting itself from the ruins and smash-up of the recent cyclone to do more than look on.”

An effort from New York Mills was the most organized. Their proposal was to remove the 16 northeastern townships from Otter Tail and form a new county known as “Clover” with New York Mills as the county seat.

At an October 1920 Clover County rally in Perham, prominent attorney M.J. Daly showered praise on the county division effort while condemning others in Perham for not showing enough cooperation.

Perham Enterprise Bulletin editor Harvey Smalley was not impressed with Daly’s speech. He called it a “juvenile tantrum” and said Daly demonstrated every America’s inalienable right to make a damn fool of themselves.
In the end there just wasn’t enough support. At the November 1920 general election the Clover County proposal was defeated by a vote of 4,020 for and 9,839 against. Ground was broken for a new county courthouse in Fergus Falls on May 4, 1921.

The independent spirit and leadership of New York Mills was also evident in its history of newspapers. The first New York Mills Herald came out in 1879, prior to the incorporation of the town. The paper was discontinued in 1885. Another English language newspaper, the New York Mills Journal, was established in 1899. There was no English newspaper from 1905-1915, after which time the New York Mills Herald was again published. Today the Dispatch has replaced the Herald as a local weekly newspaper.

However, it was the Finnish language newspapers that put New York Mills on the national map. The Uusi Kotimaa was moved from Minneapolis to New York Mills in 1884 and was published until 1931. In 1932 Frans Toumi published the Keski-Lansi which was acquired by Carl Parta and Adolph Lundquist who merged it into the Minnesotan Uutiset. They later acquired many Finnish newspapers from across the country and the resulting consolidated newspaper was renamed the Amerikan Uutiset. At its peak, the Uutiset was published 3 times a week and had a circulation of nearly 8,000.