LITTLE FALLS, the county seat, first settled in 1848 and platted in 1855, was incorporated as a village February 25, 1879, and as a city in July 1890. James Fergus is considered the founder of the village, living there until he moved to Fergus Falls and began that city. The post office opened in 1852 while part of Benton County. The city area mainly belonged to Little Falls Township, which was organized May 11, 1858, but it extends also into the adjoining Belle Prairie Township, and its part west of the Mississippi is in Pike Creek Township. Lt. Zebulon Pike in 1805-6 called the rapids or falls of the river here "Painted Rock or Little Falls," the first of these names being translated from the French traders. Mill Island, a slate outcrop a quarter of a mile long, divides the river into east and west channels, and the original descent of the rapids at this island and southward was 11 feet in three-fourths of a mile. About the year 1890 a dam was built, which raised the river 9 feet above the former head of the rapids, giving thus a total fall of 20 feet and holding the river as a mill pond for about 3 miles to the middle of the Little Elk Rapids, which previously had a descent of 7 feet in one mile.

During an exceptionally high flood stage of the Mississippi in June 1858, the steamboat North Star from Minneapolis passed over the Sauk Rapids and the Little Falls and made a pleasure trip to the Grand Rapids in Itasca County (MHS Collections, vol. 9, p. 48).

The discovery in 1878 by Frances E. Babbitt, a schoolteacher at Little Falls, of artificially flaked quartz fragments in the Mississippi valley drift gave evidence of the presence of human habitation there during the closing part of the Ice Age. "Kakabikansing," the Ojibwe name of Little Falls, meaning "the place of the little squarely cut-off rock," is the title of a memoir on this subject by Hon. J. V. Brower, published in 1902 (126 pp., with maps and many illustrations from photographs).