Ignatius Donnelly is born in Philadelphia. He arrived in Minnesota in 1857 and built a mansion at Nininger, near Hastings. He later served as first lieutenant governor of the state and as a representative in the legislature and Congress. An author on various topics, Donnelly opposed business monopolies in the weekly paper Anti-Monopolist; attested that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays in The Great Cryptogram; advanced the then-outlandish theory that a giant comet had once struck the earth in Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel; and argued for the existence of Plato's fabled island in Atlantis: The Antediluvian World.