While the house at 470 Hopkins Street is not on the National Register, it has a rich history that can help explain the changes over time in the Railroad Island neighborhood. The stories of the people who lived here were discovered by a researcher for the Minnesota Historical Society. The work of discovering the house’s story was done by Benjamin Filene, who also curated a major exhibit called “Open House: If These Walls Could Talk ” that opened at the History Center in 2006.
It was constructed in a manner that resembled the interior of the house. Visitors could walk through and experience how the structure changed through the years. They could see what the place looked like, how rooms were furnished, examine photos and other documents and hear spoken reminiscences. At least fifty families passed through 470 Hopkins Street between 1888 and 2003. Here are some of their stories:
Albert Schumacher, a German immigrant, took out a building permit and had a home for his family constructed in 1887. He was a successful pharmacist and even appeared in the Dual City Blue Book, a listing of prominent people in the Twin Cities. When people enter the parlor in the exhibit, they experience how Albert Schumacher mourned after his wife, Henriette, died in 1894. Remaining family members stayed there until 1908 and, while they then moved away, Albert stayed in the neighborhood, and duplexed the old house, becoming a landlord.
Filomeno Cocchiarella, his wife Rose, and a cousin bought the house from the Schumachers in 1923 and Italian relatives and friends soon joined them. Filomeno was a track repairman for a railroad and died in an accident on the job in December, 1945. Michelina D’Aloia, Filomeno’s niece, had moved into 470 Hopkins in 1932, shortly after she and her mother arrived in America from Italy.
When Michelina was learning English, she taught her mother the new language as well. She also helped neighbors study for their citizenship papers. “I taught them how to answer the questions and everything,” she recalled. “It was kind of scary, but when I went with them, I think they had a lot of confidence.” Michelina married Russell Frascone and they raised their family in the Hopkins Street until 1956 when, like other Italians, they moved to a newer part of the city. As people open the oven door in the historical exhibit, they hear the story of how her brother made sure there was enough food at her wedding, which took place during the meat-rationing days of WWII. He bought over seventy-five baby chickens and raised them in the basement of the house.
When you open the door of the simulated bathroom in the Historical Society exhibit, the story of Dick and Angie Krismer is revealed. They lived in the house between 1958 and 1967, a time in which many Italians were leaving the area and were being replaced by Asians, African American and Latinos. The Krismers had what at the time was called a “mixed marriage”--he was German and she was Italian. Dick worked at a slaughterhouse in South St. Paul and the screams of the pigs permanently damaged his hearing. They raised four children in a small unit and remembered having to have an “assembly line” when it was bath time.
In the 1960s and 1970s, there were fewer ethnic people who moved in and most of those newcomers were poor. Though they often had blue collar skills, there were fewer jobs because of industrialization. By the 1980s and the 1990s, the people that lived at 470 Hopkins were diverse. African American, American Indian, Latino, and Hmong were among the residents.
The phrase “Nyob Zoo!”--hello in Hmong-- is written over the door as people enter the 2002-2005 era in the exhibit. Pang Toua and his wife Mai Vang, lived in the house during that time. Pang was a soldier in the CIA-supported Hmong army in Laos. In 1975., after the American forces withdrew from Southeast Asia, he and his family of six children fled. After spending four years in a Pathet Lao work camp and two more in a Thai refugee camp, they reluctantly left their homeland and arrived in Minnesota in 1986. There is a Hmong shaman shrine In the living room and the view out the window dissolves into scenes of Laos and Thai refugee camps.
470 Hopkins is a triplex today with a new side entrance. The spacious front porch shown in an early photo has long been enclosed and the third floor where Italian families cured sausages is gone, destroyed in a 1970 fire. All of the Victorian decorations on the exterior have disappeared and the structure is now sheathed in smooth pink siding. This ordinary house was picked almost at random by Minnesota Historical Society, because they had an old photo of the location. It was a good choice, because this house turned out to be a rich microcosm of the stories that help explain the development of the entire neighborhood. So in a way, walls can talk.
]]>- The dispute between Charles Comiskey and orgainzed labor over the opening of Lexington Park -
On April 30, 1897, St. Paul's legendary Lexington Baseball Park opened to the public for the first time, the start of nearly 60 years as the site of professional baseball. One hundred years ago professional baseball was the sporting entertainment for the urban masses, many of whom were deeply affected by the resurgent labor movement of the last two decades of the 19th century. Those who put their wares before the city working classes strove not to offend the new unions and their enthusiastic adherents. Boycotts and protests against non-union enterprises by labor-oriented consumers were vigorous and frequent.
Baseball entrepreneur Charles Comiskey was the beneficiary of the construction of the new St. Paul ballpark, located at the southwest corner of Lexington and University Avenues, by a Buffalo, N.Y. capitalist named Edward B. Smith, who put $75,000 of his own money into the park, big money in those days. This, of course, was at a time when no one would have dreamed of asking for public money for such a facility.
Manager Comiskey who became the focus of a crescendo of complaints from St. Paul unions. At a meeting of St Paul's Trades and Labor Assembly in early April, a complaint against the manner of constructing the park, initiated by the Carpenters Union, was referred to the Building Trades Council. A particularly sharp grievance emanated from Local 20 of the Theatrical Stage Employees Union, who were engaged in a struggle with the management of the Metropolitan Theater over the employment of union stagehands. As a result of the dispute a boycott had been placed on the theater by organized labor, and the local was incensed when it learned that a sign advertising the Metropolitan was to go up in Lexington Park in time for opening day.
A special committee was appointed to visit Comiskey to raise these and other grievances -- asking additionally that only union label cigars be sold at the park and that only union musicians be employed at the ballpark. However, all did not go smoothly. The band Comiskey employed on opening day had misrepresented itself to him as a union group. Non-union cigars were on sale. The sign was still on the outfield fence. The Metropolitan sign had been placed in the park, Comiskey said, because he had been "hoodwinked" by the theater manager. Comiskey, the committee reported, claimed he had rented the space to a wily entrepreneur who had then sublet it to the Metropolitan over his protests. The Assembly notified Comiskey that if the sign did not come down, a boycott would be instituted.
At the May 14 meeting the baseball committee reported progress "but no assurance of a satisfactory settlement," and the boycott was imposed. Shortly afterward the sign came down. Comiskey wrote to the Assembly stating that "the Met has did just what it agreed to with me in regard to my fences and will put no sign on it." At the May 28 meeting of the Assembly the boycott was officially declared off. And finally, on July 16 James Nelson, Local 20's secretary, reported that as a result of labor's boycott the Metropolitan Opera House had closed for the season.
]]>The headline above appeared in a 1902 issue of the St Paul Globe over a story about a “group of quaint Irish families” at the “foot of Dayton’s Bluff.” The article is one of the few extensive descriptions of the area known as “Connemara Patch.”
The history of this community can be traced to the arrival of a sizeable group of immigrants from the Connemara area of Ireland. They had been persuaded to come to Minnesota in the 1880’s by Archbishop John Ireland and were initially located on farms in the western part of the state. For a variety of reasons, the experiment was a failure and many of the settlers came to St. Paul and settled along the banks of Phalen Creek between Third and Seventh Streets below Dayton’s Bluff.
The area was haphazardly laid out, with irregular roads, containing small homes, referred to as “huts or shacks” by one reporter. While other groups lived there, the Irish were the predominant group of residents. People spoke with rich accents and retained many of their old world customs, such as the production of fine Irish point lace. The community was generally poor, but some of the men found jobs with various railroads.
And it was railroad construction that heralded the disappearance of Connemara Patch. In 1908, most of the homes between Sixth and Seventh Streets were wiped out as new tracks were laid. A small cluster of homes under the Third Street Bridge and along Commercial Street remained, some of them until the 1950’s. By then, Mexican Americans had become the predominant population in the remnants of the old Irish settlement.
There is one known remnant of the historic Connemara Patch. You can find it at a not-too-distant location at 671 Conway where it was moved around 1881. The homes and grocery stores, saloons and boarding houses have disappeared from the area below the bluff, and now only fading memories remain.
Some of those memories were shared one August day in the 1980’s when Matthew McDonough stood by the site of his old home in Connemara Patch and reminisced in a newspaper article. ”It was an Irish settlement,” he said, “although there were a few people of other ethnic backgrounds.” Matthew was brought into the world in 1900 by a midwife who came to the family house at 267 Commercial Street. In the Patch, he recalled, “I don’t remember there ever being much trouble…. Nobody had anything, but we all seemed to get along.”
]]>3M stands for Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company. Except for limited efforts to extract low-grade corundum from Crystal Bay, Minnesota, for abrasives in 1904, the company has done no mining. Nonetheless, the original name remains, even though the company letterhead was changed to emphasize 3M in 1960.
3M employees long called the company “The Mining.”
]]>Minnesota doesn’t typically come to mind when you think about slavery and the Civil War. It’s also not a place that’s figured into the national imagination when it comes to Black activism, either—at least, not until recently. However, as part of the series on “Black Life in Two Pandemics,” this post draws on several events in Minnesota’s history to help us understand the connections between the historic and the current experiences of Black and Native people in the Midwest. And yes, you’d expect a historian to claim that this history matters, but it’s crucial that we understand why it’s important. These encounters matter because they demonstrate the long history of Black and Native people in what’s now the state of Minnesota, and these encounters underscore and explain critical moments in the nation’s history.
There are a number of events I could have included here, such as the establishment of 16 American Indian boarding schools across the state in the late 1800s and early 1900s, or the 1920 lynchings of three Black circus workers in Duluth in the wake of what’s come to be called the “Red Summer.” I could have explained how National Guard troops were deployed in Minneapolis in 1967 when racial tensions in the city led to protests and demonstrations, or how American Indians in Minneapolis formed the American Indian Movement in 1968 to protest police brutality. Instead, I’ve chosen to center this essay around Fort Snelling, particularly in terms of its construction as a military outpost, the experiences of enslaved people at the fort, its role in the wake of the 1862 U.S.-Dakota War, and its use as a headquarters for buffalo soldiers. Fort Snelling stands as a symbol of expansion and exploitation, but it also underscores the intertwined histories of Black and Native people in what’s now Minnesota. The history of the fort is one of white supremacy that shapes both Minnesota and national law and history, and it helps us understand the interconnected histories of racist violence, especially during this dual pandemic of police violence and COVID-19.
The Louisiana Purchase, signed a year after George Bonga’s birth, included Native lands. In 1805 U.S. Army Lieutenant Zebulon Pike set out to find places to build military posts. Pike encouraged Native leaders to sign the Treaty of St. Peters, also known as “Pike’s Purchase.” The treaty allowed the United States to build military posts and promised that the Dakota could use the land as they always had. Pike also promised to pay the Dakota for their land, but he left the amount blank. According to historian Roy Meyers, the Dakota received “$200 worth of presents” on the spot, and the Senate filled it in when they ratified the treaty.
Construction on the fort began in 1820. The U.S. government had several reasons for wanting to build a fort near Bdote. According to historian Peter DeCarlo, the United States wanted to keep the British out, profit off the resources in the region, and stay on top of the fur trade. The government also wanted to try to keep the peace between the Dakota and their Ojibwe neighbors in order to draw more Euro-American settlers to the region. Military officers, government officials, and fur traders were among those who would spend part of their lives at Fort Snelling. However, these men forcibly brought other people to the fort. The experiences of enslaved people at Fort Snelling intersected with both the growing Euro-American population and the Native peoples who found themselves on the edges of their own lands.
While the Civil War wouldn’t start until 1861, several pieces of legislation brought arguments over slavery home to Fort Snelling. The 1787 Northwest Ordinance outlawed slavery in the Northwest Territory, and the Missouri Compromise of 1820 also banned slavery in the Louisiana Purchase north of the 36°30’ parallel. However, officers in the U.S. Army were among those who illegally brought enslaved people to Fort Snelling. Lawrence Taliaferro, who served as the Indian Agent at the fort from 1820 to 1839, was the biggest local slaveholder in the region. He also imported enslaved people from Virginia to hire them out or sell them. According to historian Walt Bachman, the only thing Taliaferro lacked was an auction block. Colonel Josiah Snelling, the fort’s namesake who oversaw its construction, also owned enslaved people.
While the names of many enslaved people who were brought to Fort Snelling were never written down, enslaved people at the fort resisted their condition in numerous ways, including four who sued for their freedom. Elias T. Langham, the subagent at the Indian Agency, bought a woman named Rachel in 1830 for Lieutenant Thomas Stockton. Rachel was enslaved at Fort Snelling and at Fort Crawford in what would become Wisconsin. Rachel sued for her freedom in Missouri, and the state Supreme Court ruled in her favor in 1836. Fur trader Alexis Bailly bought an enslaved woman named Courtney in 1831. Her son, Joseph Godfrey, is the only person who is known to have grown up as an enslaved person in what is now Minnesota. Courtney also sued for her freedom, and she was freed after the decision in Rachel’s case.
Two others would become famous for their resistance to enslavement. While it is not clear if Lawrence Taliaferro bought or inherited an enslaved woman named Harriet Robinson, he brought her to Fort Snelling around 1835. Dr. John Emerson, a U.S. Army surgeon, came to Fort Snelling the following year and brought with him an enslaved man named Dred Scott. Scott and Robinson were married in either 1836 or 1837, and Taliaferro either gave or sold Robinson to Emerson. Emerson took the Scotts to St. Louis in the early 1840s, and they sued for their freedom in Missouri in 1846 and 1847. Their case eventually made it to the Supreme Court. In the 1857 decision in Scott v. Sandford, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney argued that enslaved people were not included—and were not intended to be included—under the word “citizens” in the Constitution. Instead, he wrote, they were “considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings…[who] had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the government might choose to grant them.” Taney also compared enslaved people to American Indians, arguing that the situation of enslaved people was “altogether unlike that of the Indian race.” Even though Native nations “were uncivilized, they were yet a free and independent people…governed by their own laws.” Taney’s decision would have a lasting effect on American history—and particularly on Black and Native history.
Fort Snelling was temporarily decommissioned in 1858, the same year Minnesota became a state. The Civil War started in 1861, four years after the Dred Scott decision, and the government brought Fort Snelling back into service that same year to train newly recruited soldiers for the Union. In 1862 war broke out in Minnesota. Known as the U.S.-Dakota War, the four-month conflict was, in short, the result of treaty violations by the federal government and the negligence of Indian agents. We tend to think of the Indian Wars as something confined to the American West, but the U.S.-Dakota War highlights the mid-1800s contestations over lands and resources. The Dakota, like other Native nations across the country, had been interacting with Europeans and Euro-Americans for centuries. They had tried different strategies of cooperation, negotiation, and outright resistance to government interference, military operations, religious imposition, and growing settlement. When that didn’t work, some argued that they should go to war.
It’s important to recognize that what happened in Minnesota did not just occur spontaneously. Decades of ever-increasing settlement by Europeans and Euro-Americans led to continued conflicts with Native people in the state. The Ojibwe and the Dakota were forced to sign treaties (most notably in 1837 and 1851) that ceded hundreds of thousands of acres of their lands. Missionaries and the federal government also worked to assimilate American Indians. They wanted Native nations to give up their languages, their cultures, their religions, their political systems, and their ways of life in order to become what non-Natives considered “civilized.” The push for assimilation also divided Native communities: some believed that assimilation was the best thing to do, others wanted to continue living their traditional ways, and still more Dakota tried to incorporate some new practices into their traditional systems.
The treaties the federal government signed with Native nations like the Dakota promised payments, goods, and resources (usually called annuities) in exchange for their lands. In the midst of the Civil War, though, keeping their treaty obligations wasn’t high on the government’s list of priorities. Treaties between the federal government and the Dakota had outlined how the government would provide food and goods for the Dakota in order to stop the Dakota from continuing their traditional hunting and gathering practices. When the government stopped providing these resources, it meant that many Dakota were hungry. They couldn’t hunt or harvest like before, and there weren’t enough resources to go around. If they were able to get any provisions, the food was often spoiled or unfit for consumption. By the summer of 1862, with no annuities in sight and traders unwilling to extend credit, the Dakota had nowhere to go and no one to turn to. Trader Andrew Myrick told the Dakota that, if they were hungry, they could “eat grass.” In August 1862, a group of young Dakota men skirmished with some settlers near Acton, killing five of them. The Dakota leader, Taoyateduta (also known as Little Crow), reluctantly agreed with the faction of the Dakota who argued for continuing the attacks in hopes of driving out the settlers. “We have waited a long time,” Taoyateduta told Indian agent Thomas J. Galbraith. “The money is ours, but we cannot get it. We have no food, but here are these stores, filled with food. …When men are hungry they help themselves.”
The fighting raged through southern Minnesota for several months, and there were many divisions among the Dakota as the war continued. When the fighting ended, some Dakota moved north and west to escape the army. Many Dakota who had not taken part in the fighting met General Sibley at a place that came to be known as Camp Release, and Sibley took all the Dakota into military custody. A military commission sentenced more than 300 Dakota men to death, and the remaining Dakota were forced to march to Fort Snelling. More than 1,600 Dakota reached Fort Snelling in November 1862, and they were imprisoned there for the rest of the winter. On the day after Christmas, 38 of the Dakota men who had been sentenced by the military commission were simultaneously hanged in Mankato. It was the largest mass execution in the history of the United States, and President Abraham Lincoln signed off on the executions a few weeks before he issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
The men whose sentences had been commuted were forcibly removed to Fort McClellan in Davenport, Iowa, far away from their families imprisoned at Fort Snelling. The Department of the Interior and the U.S. Army argued over who was responsible for the Dakota at Fort Snelling. The Dakota didn’t have adequate food, clothing, shelter, or access to medical attention, and several hundred Dakota died during the winter. Those who survived were forced to move to Crow Creek, a barren reservation in South Dakota, the following spring. Throughout 1863 and 1864, as the Civil War continued to rage across the South and the West, the U.S. Army launched punitive expeditions into Dakota Territory. Fort Snelling became the epicenter of these efforts, serving both as a military outpost and as a prison for captured Dakotas. The effects of the government’s subsequent treatment of the Dakota linger more than 150 years later. Dred and Harriet Scott’s enslavement at Fort Snelling, Taney’s ruling, the outbreak of the Civil War, and the U.S.-Dakota War have had lasting consequences in Minnesota and across the country.
Less than 20 years later, the U.S. Army used Fort Snelling as the regimental headquarters for several segregated all-Black units who became known as “buffalo soldiers.” Congress passed the Army Reorganization Act in 1866, and buffalo soldiers were tasked with, among other things, helping control American Indians on the Great Plains and in the American West. No one is quite sure how they got their name, but the buffalo soldiers took part in nearly 200 conflicts, skirmishes, and battles during the era of the Indian Wars. Their legacy is complicated, particularly in terms of reconciling pride in military service with the regiments’ role in the violence against and displacement of Native people.
The site of Fort Snelling had been chosen for its importance as a military outpost, and it now sits in the major metropolitan area known as the Twin Cities. Saint Paul, the state capital, was incorporated in 1854, and the neighboring city of Minneapolis was incorporated in 1867. Fort Snelling was decommissioned in 1946. It was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1960, and it reopened as Historic Fort Snelling in 1970. Its initial interpretations centered on life at the fort in 1827, so visitors never learned about enslaved people, the U.S.-Dakota War and its aftermath, or buffalo soldiers. However, local Black and Native community members, activists, and organizations have encouraged the Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS) to offer more inclusive and comprehensive interpretations and programming. In 2019, for instance, MNHS updated some signage to read “Historic Fort Snelling at Bdote.” Continued activism has helped lead to a plan to revitalize the fort and increase the number of stories that will be told, including perspectives from Native nations, soldiers, enslaved and free African Americans, and Japanese Americans during World War II. Despite these changes, the historical presence of enslaved people at Fort Snelling and the military’s decision to imprison Dakota families at the fort after the U.S.-Dakota War—two methods of policing and criminalizing Black and Native people—reverberate into the present, highlighting the prevalence of police brutality against Black and Native bodies in Minnesota and across the country.
]]>On May 5, 1943, Brig. Gen. Carl R. Gray, Jr., head of U.S. Army railroad operations in North Africa, sent a request to President William L. McKnight:
"[Please send] your Scotch Cellulose Tape, 3/4 x 2592 inches, Transparent, 3-inch core, which comes in a tin box. I don't know what we would have done had we not had it ... we must have more.”]]>
“By contributing to, and participating in civic projects, 3M and 3M employees have helped to strengthen the bond of community relationship. The unique characteristic of 3M's contribution to the many communities of which it is a part, is the scope and enthusiasm in which 3Mployes enter into many of these various programs and activities.” — 3M Megaphone, July 1953
3Mers Give Blood The company set up a blood donation program with the Red Cross. A bloodmobile came to the plant regularly.
3M and the Local High Schools 3M worked with local schools such as Johnson and Harding High Schools to recruit employees. Young men and women could work part-time while still in school, then move on to full-time jobs after graduation.
3M and Junior Achievement 3M provided advisors to the Saint Paul Junior Achievement program. The program offered practical business experience to high school students by helping them set up their own businesses.
]]>3M Abrasives Abrasives were not neglected. A new division, New Methods Engineers, developed new machinery, including a wide variety of grinders and coated abrasive belts to speed up industrial production.
3M Resins & Adhesives In the 3M laboratories, scientists developed non-rubber synthetic resins to produce adhesives used in the manufacture of ships, planes, and military equipment.
]]>The four company founders had a vision of mining corundum to use as an abrasive mineral, then shifted to manufacturing abrasives when the mining effort failed. Their persistence and the strategic investment of Lucius P. Ordway led the company to relocate to Saint Paul for better transportation and markets in 1910.
By 1977, when 3M celebrated its 75th anniversary, it estimated that every research dollar spent since 1926 (the year after the introduction of masking tape), brought over $20 in gross sales. It also estimated that 25 percent of each year’s sales volume came from new or improved products introduced in the previous five years.
“People, not dollars, develop new products and new technologies.” — Harry Heltzer, Chairman of the Board, 3M Company, 3M Sourcebook, 1977
“3M relies on the initiative, imagination, inventive genius, skill, and effort of all its people.” — 3M Employee Handbook, 1955
To attract qualified employees, 3M paid competitive wages and salaries. It was one of the first major American companies to offer employee benefits, including paid vacation time based on length of service. It offered health insurance and life insurance beginning in the 1930s. Also in 1931, before the advent of government programs, it offered a form of unemployment compensation. The company’s first pension plan was instituted in 1930, but discontinued with the beginning of the federal social security program.
The pension plan was reintroduced in 1943, with a retirement age of 65 for men and 60 for women. The company’s first employee stock-purchase plan was offered in 1928. When the revised stock purchase plan was implemented in 1949, one-third of those eligible signed up.
The company encouraged internal promotion and internal transfers, realizing that was the best way to utilize the talent of its employees. Employee longevity and loyalty were recognized through an annual service awards banquet, begun in 1948. The Carlton Society was founded in 1963 to recognize 3Mers for research, innovation, and scientific achievement.
The next year, 3M announced that it would build a $3 million laboratory building at the eastern edge of Saint Paul. This was the beginnings of 3M Center.
Celebrations for the 75th and 100th anniversaries were more low key. Each was marked by a publication that chronicled the company history.
By 1977, the company had some 80,000 employees spread across 40 countries with net sales of $3.5 billion. In 2002, those figures were approximately 75,000 employees in 60 countries with net sales of $16.3 billion. One small and obscure mining operation had been transformed far beyond its founders’ original dreams.
]]>Meet a 3Mer and you will often find that he or she has family members who also work at 3M, part of a long 3M tradition. Otto Meissner was a prime example. Living at 668 Greenbrier, he did not have far to go when he started work in the abrasives converting department in 1943 as part of the war effort. He was 65 at the time and continued at 3M for another ten years. His niece Hulda Meissner worked in the ProFab Lab as part of the group developing ribbons and non-woven fabric. His nephew John was employed in the machine shop. A son-in-law Siv Bertozzi worked in engineering. Other nephews, Fred and George, and nieces, Ann, Elsie, and Elaine, also worked at 3M. Marriages between 3M employees were a regular event, and regularly reported in the 3M Megaphone.
]]>- 653 Galtier Street -
The structure that is now 653 Family Lofts was built in 1910 and expanded in 1917. Designed by Mark Fitzpatrick, the three-story buff brick factory building was the originally home of Guiterman Family Men’s Apparel. A wide variety of items were manufactured here over the years. It also was the home of the Brantjen and Kluge printing press. Presses were built here, and printing supplies were sold out of this building. After that company moved to Wisconsin the building housed other uses including storage.
In 1992 Artspace worked with other nonprofits to turn the building into 36 apartments, with a focus on creating an artists’ community. The original apartment building name was Frogtown Family Lofts.
]]>This 1900 house has been through a number of renovation projects, and now sports a number of unusual angles and features that make it look like something out of a children’s book. It is covered over in stucco but some early streetscapes show it was originally a wood frame building.
]]>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 houses that joined the fashionable homes of more prosperous neighbors. At the time people walked or used horses to get around. Then the streetcar arrived on East Seventh and, starting on June 15, 1889, ran from downtown to Duluth Street.
Because horses could not easily make it up the steep hill, a cable car was used. It was replaced in 1893 when the system was electrified. East Seventh was one the main arterials in an out of downtown and eventually it went all the way to the suburb of White Bear. Like other streetcar strips, businesses lined both sides of the street.
Mom and pop stores served the needs of area residents who could find what they needed by walking up East Seventh, although they could take the streetcar to the large department stores in the city’s center. People later became more mobile when automobiles were more commonplace. Seventh Street stores suffered somewhat because of the lack of easy parking as residents could get to outlying suburban establishments.
Like the developments in transportation, there were also changes in the demographics in the surrounding area. Today the neighborhood is quite diverse and many of the stores reflect newer arrivals. You might keep this in mind as you stroll up Seventh Street and look at some of its landmarks.
]]>German immigrants were one of the first large groups of immigrants who flooded into Saint Paul when Minnesota became a Territory in 1849. And, as it turned out, they knew a great deal of the “inns” and outs of beer-making they brought with them from the old country. St. Paul turned out to be an almost perfect place for breweries. Before electricity, underground refrigeration was a necessity and the soft sandstone of the city river bluffs made for easy digging. There also was an abundance of pure water that flowed out of artesian wells.
One of the earliest breweries in the Saintly City was the North Star Brewery. It was opened in 1855 by the team of Edward Drewry and George Scotten, Scottish and English immigrants who, unlike the Germans, favored the production of ales. They located their new enterprise below the bluff near Commercial Street and Hudson Avenue. Starting with two 50 by 75-foot buildings and one tiny cave, they eventually expanded to a kiln for drying grain that held 120 bushels, a small malt house and cellars in the limestone cliffs.
As one early writer described it, the ale cellars "are cut into the sand rock from a series of gallerys connecting the basements of the several buildings and give a large storage room, with an equitable temperature the year round." Soon they were selling their product as far away as Chicago and Milwaukee.
The history of the brewery is complicated. Starting in 1866 the brewery was sold few times, and the German influence soon predominated with their preference for making lager beer. It appears that for a short time in the late 1860’s it was not operating. When German born Civil War veteran Reinhold Koch became an owner, he hired Jacob Schmidt, an experienced German brewmeister. Schmidt did such a good job increasing production that by the 1880s the North Star Brewery was the second largest brewery west of Chicago, producing at an annual clip of 16,000 barrels.
Schmidt was brought in as a partner and in 1884 he became the sole owner. He continued to run the successful company below the bluff until 1900, when a major fire destroyed the plant. He then removed the firm to the West End, where the Jacob Schmidt Brewing Company remained for decades. While the North Star Brewery has vanished, people can still see the cave they used, a small remnant of one limestone wall on the northern section of the park and recently-added gravel outlines of where the buildings once stood below the bluff.
]]>"The new Maker represents the combined technical skills of 3M’s engineering, research and production staffs and is constructed to produce ‘the coated abrasives of tomorrow’.” — 3M Megaphone, February 1955
The large brick house at 490 Summit Avenue was built in 1883 for Addison and Martha Foster. The home is overall Romanesque in style with Queen Anne influence, and was designed by architect Clarence Johnston. The large carriage house behind the mansion was built in 1882, and was used as a workshop to build Foster’s home and the Griggs residence next door at 476 Summit Avenue. Griggs and Foster were business partners in the lumber trade, and also close friends.
Addison Gardner Foster was born on January 28th, 1837, in Belchertown, Massachusetts. He married Martha “Mattie” Wetherbee in 1865, and by 1870 the couple was living in Minnesota, where Addison was working in the grain and real-estate business. They moved to Saint Paul in 1873, and Addison started work in the lumber trade, where he went on to contribute to forming the firm of Griggs and Foster. In 1888 the Fosters moved from their home on Summit Avenue in Saint Paul to Tacoma, Washington with their friends, the Griggs family.
Upon arriving in Tacoma, Addison Foster and Chauncey Griggs started the “Saint Paul & Tacoma Lumber Company”, with Chauncey as president and Addison as vice president. Addison went to other business ventures such as coal mining and railroad construction. On March 4th, 1899, he was elected as a Republican to the U.S. Senate out of Washington, and served until March 4th, 1905. After serving on the Senate he returned to the lumber business in Tacoma, and then retired in 1914. He lived in Tacoma Washington until his death on January 16th, 1917. The home the Fosters built on Summit Avenue in Saint Paul is now used as an event center.
]]>PROMOTING TAPES “Scotch” was adopted by 3M as a brand name for its many kinds of tape. The tartan packaging was introduced in 1945 at the end of World War II.
]]>