- 320 University Avenue - Lao Family Community of Minnesota, Inc. is a non-profit mutual assistance association founded in 1977 as the Hmong Association of Minnesota. It was founded as a nonprofit…

- 439 University Avenue - Kim Long was the name of one of the city’s first Vietnamese restaurants and one of the first businesses to shape what became Little Mekong. It was named after its owner,…

Willard's is believed to be the second-oldest bar in Saint Paul. A West End watering hole, The Spot, is the only place that is older. Willard's opened in 1908 as Kohl’s, which is what it was known as…

The Nickel Joint, 501 W. Blair Ave., is not only a traditional Frogtown working-class bar with meat raffles, a jukebox and a "Cheers" vibe, it has been home to the Baseball Old Timers Hot Stove League…

The best view of the railroads is from the east sidewalk of the Dale Street Bridge, where the railroads passed through what is now Great Northern Business Park. A railroad was first chartered by…

(Empire Builder Business Park) - 23-27 Empire Drive - Built in 1882, the shops and the people who worked in them did every aspect of work imaginable for locomotives, freight and passenger rail…

- Dale Street and Minnehaha Avenue - (Northeast corner) The Dale Street Shops were part of a large industrial park, at the northeast corner of Dale Street and Minnehaha Avenue. Built as part of…

Constructed beginning in the late 1800’s, the railroad shops of the Chicago, St Paul, Minneapolis & Omaha Railway (the “Omaha”) at Randolph and Toronto Streets employed nearly 1,000 workers for the…

Closely allied to the Omaha’s Randolph Street Shops was the Orme Brass and Iron Works at Drake and Armstrong streets, a foundry that furnished a range of cast iron and brass items to the railroad’s…

German workers and German bosses had a monopoly on brewing beer in St Paul, as they did almost everywhere in the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries. As historian Gary Brueggeman has…

Workers from Bohemia, and other Slavic minorities within the Austro-Hungarian Empire did not predominate in a single industry, like the Germans. Their most enduring monument is the three-story Czech…

Women working outside the home for wages were a small minority of the wage-working class at least until the post World War I era. There were virtually no women employed in the brewing industry until…

East Seventh Street was the main business strip of Dayton’s Bluff starting in the 1870’s. The railroad tracks just to the north attracted industry which, in turn, promoted the building of worker’s…

The David Barton Labyrinth and Reflective Garden is located just west of Maria Avenue and East Seventh Street on the Metropolitan State University campus. The community connection with the university…

The first significant point of entry for African Americans was in bondage to officers stationed at Fort Snelling. Although slavery was never legal in Minnesota, Army officers were allowed to bring…

- Saint Paul Early Settler, 1799-1884 - James Thompson arrived at Fort Snelling as a slave in 1827. He married an Ojibwe woman and learned the language. In the 1830s, he was hired by missionary…

(1831-1900) When the steamboat Northern arrived in 1863 carrying labor and equipment to defuse a Dakota Indian uprising, it also towed a raft of 76 ex-slaves that had been found drifting. The…

In the 1800s Saint Paul served as the head of navigation on the Mississippi River. The lower landing provided entry for most of the people and goods coming North. Like many early groups to the region,…

Even though pre-Civil War legislation attempted to restrict the movement of African Americans to Minnesota, free blacks and fugitive slaves continued to come. The highest concentration of blacks…

Many skilled black artisans were recruited to Saint Paul to work on buildings going up in the early 1900s. Many of them arrived from Georgia with the marble used in those buildings. Casiville Bullard,…