Andrew Bonney Robbins

Andrew Bonney Robbins (April 27, 1845 – June 16, 1910) was an American entrepreneur, civil war veteran, and real estate developer in the pioneer period of Minneapolis.

The father was a representative businessman of Phillips, Maine, possessing a considerable estate and making his home in New England until 1855, when he brought his family to what was then the far west, settling at Anoka, in the Minnesota Territory.

[2] He was seventeen when, in 1862, he joined the Union Army, enlisting in the Eighth Regiment of Minnesota Volunteers, with which he served until the close of the civil war.

Afterward, the command was joined to General William Tecumseh Sherman's forces, and thus, Robbins saw active duty on some of the most hotly contested battlefields of the south.

He began dealing there in lumber, farm machinery, and grain, developing a business of considerable proportions along all those lines and also founding the Bank of Willmar.

Robbins and his brother-in-law, T. B. Walker, drove through the countryside where not a green leaf remained, the insects having destroyed every vestige of growing plants.

Fraternally, he was a thirty-second degree Mason and was also an active and valued member of the Grand Army of the Republic, serving as commander of his post.