The story of Dayton’s Bluff begins on top of the bright white cliffs over-looking St. Paul, where the great Mississippi River cut hundreds of feet downwards into the sedimentary rock, forming the bluffs. This natural landmark attracted the first inhabitants who built burial mounds that can still be found upon this sacred site. Later, the Dakota would call the area Imniza Ska, meaning white cliff and their large seasonal village of Kaposia could be found just down river.
This bluff also stands on top of the sacred Wakan Tipi cave or “Dwelling of the Great Mystery” later called Carver's Cave, after Jonathan Carver, the first British explorer to visit and witness the impressive site.
Soon after the coming of the first explorers, and the U.S. achieved independence, other immigrants began to arrive, including fur traders and soldiers from Fort Snelling.
Claims were made, farming land was established and homes were built atop the bluff, by wealthy speculators such as Lyman Dayton and his wife Maria, for whom the area is named.
Before the railroad cut through a portion of Carver’s cave and filled the land below, the area was a vast swamp that separated it from downtown St. Paul, before bridges connected these two points. Phalen Creek, which fed this swamp, attracted many of the first flour, feed and lumber mills and here working-class neighborhoods grew.
The 1860's saw the growth of German and Irish communities, and businesses, churches and cultural institutions began to flourish. The wealthier began to build large houses higher on the hills - the most prominent being the Hamm’s mansion which overlooked his large brewery below.
Industries like the Hamm’s Brewery and the railroad provided new economic opportunities for the waves of immigrants coming into the area. Neighborhoods like Swede Hollow and Connemara Patch, separated by the 7th Street improvement arches, flourished along the Phalen Creek Ravine.
Soon, businesses like 3M and Whirlpool brought additional economic prosperity and housing flourished, up and beyond the ravine.
While Phalen Creek has since been placed underground and many of the mansions that topped the bluff no longer stand, much of Dayton’s bluff remains the same.
Today, Dayton’s Bluff is alive with vibrant insitutions like Metro State University and a more recent immigrant population that continues to build the character of the East Side of St. Paul.
But at any moment, you can travel back...
As you walk the bluff you can imagine the first indigenous peoples looking out across the marshy valley and vast river below, see yourself as an original pioneer hunting deer and meeting with the Dakota people, listen to the steamboat whistles and chugging locomotives coming up from the river valley, and watch the first aeroplane fly over the light tower, as you look down, seeing St. Paul for what it truly is, a gateway to our past and our future, flowing with the ever running river current below.
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]]>When the European settlers arrived in vicinity of Saint Paul, the Mdewakanton band of Dakota had already lived here for decades. They called the general area "Imniza-Ska" or "white cliffs” referring to the towering sandstone bluffs. Their village of Kaposia, was located below today’s Dayton’s Bluff. Numbering a few hundred, they lived among the oak groves on the east bank of the Mississippi River, which they called Wakpa Tanka.
The name Kaposia means “light weight” thought to have been a reference to the fact that the Dakota travelled with few possessions. The group had a succession of leaders called Little Crow because their ceremonial garb included the skin and wings of a raven or crow. The most well-known was Little Crow whose real name was Taoyateduta, or “His Scarlet People”.
Kaposia contained frame buildings covered with bark and some could house more than two dozen people. Platforms were constructed outside for food drying, storage, and occasional sleeping during the warmer months of the year. Inside structures were covered by skins or rush mats used for sitting and sleeping.
Dakota life varied with the seasons. In late March there might be maple sugaring and muskrat hunting and by May the women would plant corn, pumpkin squash and beans. The men would fish, trap and sometimes leave for buffalo hunting further west. Late September was cranberry picking and wild rice gathering time, followed by Winter, a time of indoor work. With the arrival of Spring, the cycle began again.
Kaposia was sometimes visited by early explorers and visitors. In 1823, one member of Captain Stephen Long’s expedition wrote about the village, which he said consisted of ten or twelve structures, situated at a turn on the river. He said “the houses that we saw… here are formed by upright flattened posts, implanted in the ground, without any intervals…these posts support the roof, which presents a surface of bark. Before and behind each there is a scaffold, used for the purpose of drying maize, pumpkins, etc."
After the 1837 treaty with the Dakota, the United States took possession of Minnesota land east of the Mississippi and Kaposia was relocated across the river near today’s South St. Paul. However, the Dakota were still frequent visitors and traders in St. Paul until an 1851 treaty forced them to move westward to a reservation along the Minnesota River.
]]>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.”
]]>After a lengthy war between England and France (which had laid claim to the area that included today’s St. Paul), they ceded the land to England in the treaty of 1763. Eager to find out the nature of what they saw as their colonial possession, the English dispatched Johnathan Carver to visit. His exploration led him up the Mississippi River and, on November 14, 1766 he came to "a remarkable cave of amazing depth that the Indians called Wakan-Tipi,” which roughly translates as the Dwelling of the Great Mystery.
Carver later wrote a book about his explorations that included information about the cave and, although the Dakota had led him there, he decided to give the landmark his own name. Here, with the original spellings, is part of his descriptions: “The rock at the enterance of the cave is of lightish gray colour and very soft like the grit of a grindstone. I found many strange heiroglyphycks cut in the stone some of which was very acient and grown over with moss. On the stone I marked the arms of the King of England.”
Because Carver published an account of his adventures, later travelers often tried to visit the famous cavern. After the Revolutionary War, the United States gained its independence from England and its leaders also sent people to explore what they considered their new possessions.
The cave was sometimes “lost” when falling limestone and debris covered its entrance, so sometimes explorers were not successful finding the historic landmark. In Saint Paul’s early days, Wakan Tipi was accessible and often visited by early settlers. When the railroads arrived in Minnesota, the front entry may have been destroyed by their construction work.
Over time the famous cavern had been covered by falling limestone and other debris. Then in 1913, a neighborhood group undertook a year-long effort to find it and were able to uncover the entrance. At the time they hoped that it would become a tourist attraction complete with interior lighting.
While the city did buy the area around the cave the grand vision of a national attraction faded and once again Carver’s Cave was mostly forgotten. Recently, however, the significance of Wakan Tipi was once again recognized as it has became one of the area’s high points and although it is protected, it can be seen from the walking trails in the Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary.
]]>A thousand years ago the area around the confluence of Trout Brook and Phalen Brook near the Mississippi River was a marshy flood plain. By the early 1900s, the entire delta had been expanded by filling and became an industrial railroad corridor. As rail use decreased in the 1970s, the land was largely abandoned and buildings and tracks were removed.
If you saw it in 1980, it was a barren, fed litter-strewn site that had been the victim of illegal dumping. However, local East Side activists and Lowertown residents saw the site’s potential and in 1997 they began working together as the Lower Phalen Area Project. They joined with the DNR, National Park Service to reclaim a twenty seven acre area to start developing a landmark that combined restoration of the riverfront habitat with public access.
The City purchased the land and restoration work was soon undertaken by volunteers who removed tons of debris that had been dumped over the years. Clean soil was brought in to replace marginal land and invasive buckthorn was uprooted. The goal was to bring back a mix of floodplain forest, prairie and oak savanna tamarack seepage swamps, and four acres of bedrock bluff prairie.
The twenty-seven acre park now contains native plant communities and the wildlife is returning. Two small ponds attract waterfowl and the uplands are home to grassland bird species. Turkey vultures, bald eagles, and red tail hawks are now seen along the sandstone bluffs. Pedestrian paths and bicycle trails have been installed, a series of three wetlands now hold abundant water and a spring-fed stream runs through the property.
On May 21, 2005 the park was opened to the public and was named in honor of Bruce Vento, a native of the East Side, a teacher and a U. S. Congressman who served the area from 1977 until 2000. He was the author of a law that created a Mississippi National River and Recreational Area.
There are a few remnants of the older days, including railroad maintenance pads that echo the importance of trains to the area history and mention the old brewery. The project recreated a number of ecosystems that had existed including oak woodlands, floodplain forests, prairies and oak savannas. Carver’s Cave is protected, but its entrance can be observed.
The Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary’s walking and biking paths take visitors through a vibrant habitat with colorful signs that explain and interpret various parts of the site. Volunteers have planted nearly 2,000 trees, and the wetlands and prairie sections are now filled with colorful flowers. While trains occasionally rumble by below the bluff, you are more likely now to see eagles, Indigo buntings, northern flickers and red tailed hawks and other wildlife soaring above the park.
]]>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.
]]>Located at the foot of Indian Mounds Park, Willowbrook Hatchery was started in 1878 by the newly formed State Fish Commission. Raising fish to stock the lakes and streams of Minnesota was—and still is— an important state function and the site below Dayton’s Bluff was an almost perfect spot for such activity. The hatchery utilized ponds to catch the water that came flowing out of springs in the bluffs. The nearby railroad tracks made it easy to ship fish throughout the state. By 1894, 1,212,000 Brook Trout and 31,600,000 Walleye Pike had been produced and distributed.
It became a tourist attraction and contemporary writers tell of the large number of visitors from all over the state who came to stroll around the hatchery grounds. There was also mention of people from “neighboring camps” possibly referring to the frequent gathering of “hobos” near the railroad tracks.
Senator W. W. Dunn and others “engineered a private subscription” for the purchase of a number of acres of land that was donated to the state provided they continued to raise fish on it. The development of Indian Mounds Park on the bluffs boomed the tourism at the Hatchery which was soon expanded to include sixty-two acres.
One Dayton’s Bluff resident wrote that on balmy Sunday afternoons in the early years of the Twentieth Century, “whole families walked to Indian Mounds Park, thence down the long and steep pathway to the fish hatchery where there were several outdoor pools containing large fish, the likes of which some of us had never caught.” Later a small zoo was added as an additional attraction.
The St. Paul Parks Department reported in 1903 that the Fish Hatchery grounds had “for many years been an object of great interest to the public, but it was only accessible by a steep and difficult road, subject to frequent washouts.”
A thoroughfare was finally constructed from Indian Mounds Park to the hatchery below which revealed “a series of delightful views as it winds around the crests and slopes of the hill.” When finished, a newspaper said “it will be one of the pleasantest driveways in the city.”
Today the fish hatchery remains below the bluff, but its operations have been greatly reduced. They still hatch Muskies and raise them to fingerling size before sending the fry, as they are called, to state ponds for further development.
The zoo is long gone and Warner Road was cut through the center of the site during the post-war era. The old road and the trails are over-run and their remnants are barely visible but could be resurrected at some future date. There is still one large pond and, in case you ever wondered about it, that’s where the fish from the DNR’s State Fair display spend the rest of the year.
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