The first employment services for African Americans seeking entry into the local workforce were delivered out of barbershops and beauty parlors. Most important of these was the Hall Brothers Barbershop. S. Edward and O.C. Hall serviced white politicians and business leaders. Using these connections, the Hall Brothers posted jobs and personally referred many individuals to prospective employers. Churches began providing a more organized resource for locating jobs and housing through newsletters like St. James A.M.E.'s "The Helper."
In 1887, the Minnesota Protective and Industrial League and later the Afro American League played pivotal roles in improving the economic condition of blacks Out of a confluence of local activities and a national black agenda emerged the Urban League of Saint Paul, founded in 1923 with the help of barber S. Edward Hall. Interestingly, the local white business association objected to the formation of this branch fearing that it would encourage more black migration to Minnesota.
]]>In 1914 the Union Hall Association was created to meet the needs of the growing black community and to improve relationships with the white community. It built the Hallie Q. Brown Community House between Mackubin and Kent to house its programs. The facility became the second-largest neighborhood center in Saint Paul, nurturing youth and providing a gathering place for African Americans. Later, the name was changed to the Hallie Q. Brown Community Center and a larger facility was built. Today the center includes the Martin Luther King Recreation Center and the nationally acclaimed Penumbra Theatre.
]]>“In the legal profession, Labor found a friend,
A lawyer on whom the toilers could depend.
A fearless advocate of truth and right,
And foe to every wrong upheld by might.
This man was Erwin, dauntless, bold and free,
Whose name shall live in glorious memory.
Whenever workingmen, who toil for bread,
Remember July 6th at brave Homestead.”
(A tribute to WW Erwin by an anonymous worker-poet in 1893.)
WW Erwin’s parents must have intended him to be a battler for justice. They named him “William Wallace,” after the legendary fighter for Scottish independence who stood at the Stirling Bridge against the forces of English King Edward I. History does not disclose whether Wallace looked like Mel Gibson, who played him in the 1995 film, “Braveheart,” but in St Paul he was known as "a tall man with the body of a giant,” as a medieval Scottish historian described Wallace. Pseudonymous columnist Benjamin Backnumber of the St Paul Daily News remembered Erwin as a “six-foot frame of sinew, tireless strength and panther suppleness. The working people of St Paul and beyond knew him as “The Tall Pine,” and honored him for his defense of labor’s rights. Erwin was arguably THE outstanding defense attorneys here. He was, the St. Paul Dispatch wrote on the occasion of his death, “the greatest criminal lawyer the Northwest ever knew.”
At the peak of his powers and success, Erwin embraced the labor movement that erupted in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Perhaps because his legal career had been devoted to defense of the underdog, he offered his forensic talents freely to insurgent workers brought before the courts. Erwin was the outstanding defense attorney for participants in two of the three biggest labor battles of the nineteenth century, the Pullman railroad strike and boycott of 1894 and the strike against Andrew Carnegie’s Steel Works at Homestead, Pennsylvania, in 1892. These strikes were met with heavy military and judicial repression—and with unprecedented enthusiasm and solidarity from the ranks of labor.
On July 6, 1892, an armed force of about 300 men from the Pinkerton Detective Agency that industrialist Andrew Carnegie had procured battled over 1,000 striking steel workers, family members, and supporters who had massed on the banks of the Allegheny River to confront Carnegie’s men. The violence that followed left nine workers and three Pinkertons dead. Mass protest meetings, sponsored by city central bodies of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), were held all across the country in support of the steel workers. When strikers at Homestead were indicted for murder, riot, conspiracy and even treason, the St Paul Trades and Labor Assembly, some 900 miles removed, took a remarkable initiative procuring the services of Erwin to serve as lead counsel for the defendants. Erwin quickly secured the acquittal of the first two defendants; the prosecution of the remaining defendants was abandoned.
In 1894, Erwin went to Chicago to join the defense team, which included Clarence Darrow, representing American Railway Union leaders including Eugene V Debs, and Minneapolis railroad worker Sylvester Keliher, who were charged with contempt of court for failing to heed a Federal Court injunction instructing them to terminate the nationwide boycott by the ARU in support of striking Pullman workers. Denied a trial by jury, the defendants were convicted and sentenced to six months in prison. Nonetheless, Erwin’s performance in the courtroom was celebrated far and wide.
“Bill Irwin’s Oratory,” the New York Sun reported, “is the wonder of the bar and the admiration of the Northwest . . . . His voice now cracks into ice, now boils into geysers, is now thrown at the jury like a hammer . . . now leaps like thunder . . . now stops with the guttural protest of a Third avenue cable car kicking against the brake. The plaster drops, the nails are drawn out, the ceiling topples, the floor sags, even the janitor trembles in his slippers.”
Erwin’s home at 481 Iglehart was unfortunately torn down in the 1960’s.
]]>The impressive house on the southwest corner of Lexington and Laurel Avenues (127 N Lexington) was built for Italian stonecutter Anthony Ambrosini in 1886. (Took out building permit April 30, 1886) He must have brought his bride, Augusta Strehlin, to the home, since city records indicate they were married on October 19, 1886.
Ambrosini was from a family of Italian stonecutters. In 1880 Ambrose and two brothers, all stonecutters, were living in Chicago with two Ariola brothers, also stonecutters. It appears that Anthony emigrated from Cercino, Italy, not far from Cararra, the archetypal marble quarrying location since Roman times. By 1883, Anthony was in St Paul, living at 1050 W 7th Street, and working as a stonecutter..
In 1885 Ambrosini had set up as an independent stone contractor with partner John Peterson. Their stone yard was located on Oak Street near Walnut, close to the Mississippi River in downtown St Paul, a typical location for a stone yard, facilitating delivery by boat.
By 1887, the partnership had apparently dissolved and Ambrosini was working for the Lauer Brothers, a major stone contractor operated by two Alsatian brothers. The Lauer Brothers were one of the contractors on the construction of the State Capitol building. A significant structure they financed and built are the “Lauer Flats” at 226 Western Avenue. And by then the house on Lexington Avenue had been sold.
By 1890, Ambrosini was in business for himself again, carving and selling headstones and monuments conveniently located across from Oakland Cemetery at 941 Jackson Street. Within three years, Ambrosini had made another move, and was conducting his stonecutting business in marble and granite at the newly opened Forest (now Forest Lawn) Cemetery on Edgerton Street, where he also was employed as superintendent.
Forest Cemetery was the first in St Paul to offer cremation as an option, and describes itself as the “11th oldest cemetery in the nation to offer cremation.” The idea of cremating the remains of the deceased was so novel that a number of early cremations were written about in the local newspapers. Superintendent Ambrosini himself was pictured in the March 26, 1903 Saint Paul Globe scattering the remains of Mrs. Dike about the grounds of the cemetery (in this case identified as “Forest Hills”). Eventually, Anthony’s oldest son John took over as superintendent at the cemetery.
Augusta died March 20, 1917. It appears Anthony died in Glendale, California in the 1930’s.
]]>- 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.
]]>Before there was the “DFL” there was the “FL.” The Minnesota Farmer-Labor party existed as an independent party of workers and farmers from 1918 to 1944, essentially from World War I to World War II. The core of its support was the trade union movement and organizations of working farmers. It elected three governors, Floyd B Olson, Elmer Benson and Hjalmar Peterson, and innumerable state and local officials, including William Mahoney as Mayor of St Paul in 1932.
William Mahoney was a printing pressman by trade and a socialist and labor politician by avocation. He was born in Chicago in 1869 and died in St Paul in 1952 at the age of 83. In his long and active life, Mahoney was President of the St Paul Trades and Labor Assembly and editor of the St Paul Union Advocate, newspaper and the prime mover of the organization of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor party. At his death he was still a delegate to the Trades and Labor Assembly, representing Pressmens Local 29.
Mahoney had many friends across the political spectrum, including legendary newspaper columnist and former Mayor Larry (“Larry Ho”) Hodgson, who wrote to Mahoney in 1934 that “I think of you as a friend that would stand by me in any personal calamity.” Reflecting on Mahoney's defeat in the 1934 election, Hodgson said, “in the last week I have been wondering if the great moneyed concerns can ever be dethroned except by Revolution.”
Mahoney had called for municipalizing Northern States Power Company, the predecessor of Xcel Energy as a city-owned utility, provoking ferocious opposition from the city's business and banking establishment. St Paul residents, he said, were “paying the highest electric rates in the nation and 10,000 unemployed and destitute families were accorded an inadequate subsistence by public and private charities.” Mahoney wrote and circulated a proposal for legislation “to Establish a State-Wide System of Public Industries for the Employment of Out-of-Work and Needy Citizens.”
Mahoney's former home is at 1852 Dayton Avenue. Main Street, on which the St Paul Labor Center is located, is co-named “William Mahoney Street.
]]>Located on the north side of Selby Avenue between Virginia and Farrington Streets, this pleasant, tree-filled square-block park honors St Paul's outstanding African American union leader. In 1973 the Ramsey Hill Association proposed naming the park for fur trader and capitalist Norman Kittson. A counter proposal came from the Selby-Dale Freedom Brigade, who argued for Frank Boyd as a fitting and proper designation. On May 1, 1976 the park was dedicated by a group of “labor oriented black citizens of St. Paul” led by Reginald Harris, a member of Firefighters Local 21.
Frank Boyd was born in Kansas City, Kansas, in 1881. As related by Arthur McWatt, a chronicler of African American history, “Boyd arrived in St. Paul in 1904 and found work as a porter in a Black barber shop. He worked there for three years before deciding to try working as a Pullman porter for the Northern Pacific Railroad. During World War I, Boyd joined the Railroad Mens International Benevolent Industrial Association. Boyd helped to organize the local in St. Paul. The local elected George Shannon its president.
After the war, Boyd was instrumental in the organization of a branch of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Union in St. Paul.” The fraternal organization began its formation in New York City in 1919. A.W. Jordon was elected president of the St. Paul branch. Frank Boyd was chosen as its delegate to the Chicago convention that October. On January 13, 1926, Local 3 held its first meeting at the Welcome Hall Community House, located on Farrington and St. Anthony Streets. Mainly through Boyd's efforts Local 3 grew to over 700 members. He died in California on May 2, 1962. His body was returned to St. Paul. He is buried in Elmhurst Cemetery.
Frank Boyd Park is dedicated to the memory of this outstanding leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Union and St. Paul's African American community. A bust of Boyd is located at the southwest corner of the park and a plaque reads: "Frank Boyd, 1881 – 1962. He was a fighter for his Union, his People, his Class."
]]>Since 1840, St. Paul has taken on different identities: frontier hamlet, steamboat burg, provincial capital, and railroad boomtown. These transformations have left their marks all over town. Nowhere can one see them better than on Cathedral Hill, which was known in day’s past as St. Anthony Hill.
At the Hill District’s beginning, you will find remnants of the empire-building years of the late 19th-century. Here lived people of wealth, ambition, and ostentation. The site offers one of the city’s best views: to the north, the Capitol; to the east, downtown below and Dayton’s Bluff in the distance; and to the southeast, Cherokee Heights. The observer blessed with imagination may see it as it was before transformed by the human hand: the tree-lined river gorge, the great turn of the river to the south, low hills rising on the left, white cliffs, sandbars in the channel, and wetlands and woods where downtown now stands.
As St. Paul expanded, the wealthy desired a location atop the bluffs, as a grand view of the river valley, a place above the industrial air and close proximity to their businesses below. Initially, only the wealthy had the means to transport themselves up the bluff. But later, stagecoach and streetcar routes afforded middle and working class citizens a means of traveling from work below to their homes up on the hill.
Beginning in 1890, the three streetcar lines ranged west from St. Anthony Hill along the parallel Grand Avenue, Rondo Avenue, and Selby Avenue. When the Selby streetcar route was developed, it ran every 3 minutes at peak times, along a newly established commercial route. This period marked the greatest boom in residential and commercial construction. However, 1922 ordinance prevented the building of multi-family dwellings thus preserving much of the original appearance to this day.
This area also included the Rondo neighborhood which sat north, where Highway 94 is today. The highways construction destroyed the vibrant African American community which had survived almost independently. Forced migrations scattered residents throughout the more depressed areas of Selby and University. Recovering from varying degrees of urban flight and red-lining, Selby is an area of resurgence, with an influx of new businesses and home ownership.
As you tour the area, you’ll visit the grand Roman Catholic Cathedral, completed in 1915. A visit here is akin to traveling back to ancient Rome and truly one of the greatest architectural marvels in the United States.
Although modest in comparison, a short trip down the hill from the Cathedral are some of Cass Gilbert's most exemplary works in religious architecture. Across from Boyd park on Selby is the Virginia Street Swedenborgian Church and four blocks northwest of there is Dayton Avenue Presbyterian Church - the first of which houses one of the longest-established congregations in the city. Other prominent buildings in the area in between the two churches on Selby and Western are the Dacotah Building, once the W.A. Frost Pharmacy, and the Blair Flats, which was once Hotel Albion, then the Angus Hotel.
Around Summit, you’ll also see such structures as the Governor’s Mansion, F.Scott Fitzgerald’s birthplace home, Stuart Driscoll house, the oldest on Summit, and even the rare remnants of the streetcar rails. The new light rail harbors a return to the connectedness of this area to a larger community, and the great potential that it brings.
For more (including 3 images & 1 video) view the original article
]]>The electric streetcar service began on Selby Avenue in 1890. St. Anthony Hill, however, proved to be a vexatious impediment; the steep grade made for slow and hard going travel, especially in winter. At about the same time that work began on the Cathedral of St. Paul, the city began digging a solution to the streetcar problem: the Selby Tunnel. It opened in 1907, taking people from the base of St. Anthony Hill beneath Selby Avenue to an opening near Nina Street. Streetcars used the tunnel until their demise in the early 1950s. The tunnel closed in 1959, but its lower entrance can still be seen, just down the slope from the Cathedral.
As St. Paul boomed in the late 19th-century, housing and commerce marched west across what must have seemed to developers an endlessly spacious prairie. Three streetcar lines ranged west from St. Anthony Hill along the parallel Grand Avenue, Rondo Avenue, and Selby Avenue. People filled the neighborhoods, and businesses followed the people, clustering along the three lines. Each of these commercial corridors had its own character. Selby Avenue businesses catered to people’s daily needs: food, clothing, and services.
By 1930, roughly the peak of streetcar commerce, there were nearly a hundred businesses on Selby between Western Avenue and Lexington Parkway—groceries, confectioneries, cobblers, moviehouses, butchers, pharmacies, and dressmakers. The Selby-Dale corner was the hub: at one time there were twenty-six businesses on a single block. This intersection was also a center of Jewish commerce: Proprietors named Levy, Cohen, Braufman, Eisenberg, Herman, and Katz ran stores there.
]]>The building at the southeast corner of the site, finished in 1863, is one of the city's oldest, and the oldest outside of downtown. The story goes back even further, to St. Paul's second decade.
In 1851 four nuns of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet arrived in St. Paul – then a muddy hamlet at best – and opened a school in what had been the log chapel that gave the city its name. Among their first pupils was Mary Mehegan, the future Mrs. James J. Hill.
When the school moved to St. Anthony Hill (now Cathedral Hill) in 1863, it was considered so far from downtown that it became a boarding school rather than a day school. Only when the city has grown around it did it become a day school again – for girls only – in 1905. St. Joseph's received an astounding guest in 1879; according to the centennial history of St. Joseph's, the entire body of St. Irinaeus, retrieved from the catacombs of Rome, was interred beneath the altar. (Another version of the facts has it that his remains were destroyed in France by Huguenots in 1562.)
The second most famous resident of St. Joseph's was the nun known as Mother Seraphim, who as Provincial Superior of the order lived there from 1882 to 1930. Mother Seraphim, founder of the College (now University) of St. Catherine, was also sister to Archbishop John Ireland. A high-achieving family.
Those with a sense of history may see in St. Joseph's a symbol of the tradition of Roman Catholic education in St. Paul, one still strong today.
As one can easily see, the school was augmented twice in its original style. The central building went up in 1877 and the large addition to the north in 1931. The school closed in 1971. The Protestant Christ's Household of Faith bought has used the place as a school and living quarters since 1976.
]]>The first stop of the westbound Selby Avenue streetcar after emerging from the tunnel was at the corner of Selby and Western. It made that corner desirable as a business address. And there was a time in the late 19th century when prosperous people, sometimes after their children had grown, chose to live in residential hotels – the most famous of which was the Aberdeen, also at the Selby/Western intersection.
The italianate Blair Flats went up in 1887 at a cost of $300,000, about $5 million in today's money. It became a residential hotel, the Albion, in 1893. When streetcar magnate Thomas Lowry bought it in 1911, it became the Angus and kept that name till its closing in 1971.
The world changed in the meantime. The once-fashionable neighborhood developed pockets of decay; houses that had once been mansions could be had for a dollar. The Angus, once a symbol of prosperity, became a reproachful reminder of a seemingly irretrievable past. A visitor in the early 1970s would have seen a grimy hulk awaiting the wrecking ball.
But the success of W.A. Frost across the street, and the early stirrings of preservation and gentrification, brought a different destiny. The Angus reopened in 1985 as a mixed-use complex of apartments, offices, and retail and remains so today. The best place to get a sense of the original interior is in the basement, where you will find graceful brick arches and the foundation stones of Platteville limestone, St. Paul's original building material. The exterior has been beautifully restored. The Angus has done the full circle as a neighborhood symbol – first of growth, then decline, and now rebirth.
]]>St. Paul began as a steamboat town, but that era lasted barely 30 years. Railroads, and the boom in population and prosperity that they brought, made St. Paul into a city. As the city outgrerw the downtown bowl, those with means moved up, literally, to higher ground and away from the clatter and smoke of the riverfront. Money follows money, so as people came to Cathedral Hill, businesses followed.
The Richardsonian Romanesque Dacotah builing went up in 1889 at a cost of $70,000. The following year the Newfoundland-born, New York educated W.A. Frost arrived in the city and set up a pharmacy downtown. He moved the business to the Dacotah a few years later. Frost had a long and distinguised career and was one of the creators of the University of Minnesota College of Pharmacy. He operated the business and lived in the neighborhood until his death in 1930.
The pharmacy carried on for another 20 years, under Oscar Nordrum, but closed in 1950. The Cathedral Hill area went into a long decline, with aging buildings, little new investment, and, starting around 1970, a rapid decline in population. Many fine old buildings around the city tumbled, and this one might have too.
But where many saw blight, a few saw opportunity. The Rupp family bought the Dacotah in 1974 and opened – an act of faith! – W.A. Frost bar and restaurant in 1975. This was one of the first, and bravest, acts of private preservation in the city. It turned out to be a harbinger of the revival of Cathedral Hill as a whole. W.A. Frost has thrived now for nearly 40 years. The interior is wonderfully restored, with period fixtures and furnishings brought in from near and far.
]]>This is one of three F. Scott Fitzgerald landmarks in this part of St. Paul. The building itself is merely a solid representative of late Victorian apartment buildings. Its sole claim to fame is that Fitzgerald was born on the second floor on 24 September 1896 and lived there as an infant, until his family moved to Buffalo in 1898.
Fitzgerald fans and neighborhood explorers might want to check out the two other sites, both more beautiful than this one. Five blocks east stands 286-294 Laurel, Laurel Terrace, where Fitzgerald lived (in the first house, look for the plaque) in 1908 and 1909. Architectural historian Larry Millet calls this one of the finest Victorian row houses in the United States,” designed by Clarence Johnston and William H. Willcox.
Willcox and Johnston also designed the third Fitzgerald landmark, four blocks south of 481 Laurel, at 587-601 Summit. Fitzgerald's parents lived there for several years; he did not, but he did rewrite This Side of Paradise in 599 Summit in the summer of 1919. That novel made him famous and launched his career. He never lived in St. Paul again.
Just around the corner at 25 North Dale, on the steps of the former St. Paul Academy, which Fitzgerald attended, you will find a charming statue of Fitzgerald as a boy.
A stroll among these three sites would take the visitor through one of St. Paul's most attractive neighborhoods and a fine array of preserved and restored late Victorian houses.
]]>This is the largest of Cass Gilbert's four churches in the area (the others are the Virginia Street Swedenborgian Church, St. Clement's Episcopal, and the former German Bethlehem Church at the foot of Ramsey Hill). Though Gilbert was talented – he went on to design the Minnesota State Capitol, New York's Woolworth building, and the U.S. Supreme Court building among many others – for this commission he had the inside track: His mother was a founding member of the congregation.
Born in 1859, Gilbert came to St. Paul from Zanesville, Ohio, in 1868. The Dayton Avenue congregation built a frame building on the site in 1873. The contrast between the original building and this one demonstrates the church's growth in numbers and resources.
The stone is Lake Superior sandstone, a popular medium of the time, and the design favors that of the influential architect H.H. Richardson, hence Richardsonian Romanesque. Having grown up Presbyterian, Gilbert knew the congregation desired a simple functionality inside. As architectural historian Larry Millet noted, “within, there's a column-free auditorium with a radial design and vaulted ceiling.” The building was dedicated in 1888.
]]>Before swift fire trucks, every neighborhood – especially those of wood frame construction, like most of St. Paul – needed a fire station. Making a fire call was slower and more complicated then. You had to alert and gather the firefighters, then as now, but also arouse, assemble, and harness the team of horses before starting the not-very-rapid chase to the fire. Therefore, proximity was everything.
When this fire station opened in 1882, St. Paul was still spreading at a population of 42,000, filling the open prairie to the west of downtown. By 1890, the population had risen to 133,000. This was one of the first neighborhood firehouses. Before this, there had been just four, all located in downtown. Ten years later, the city had 17. (Today, though St. Paul's population has more than doubled since 1890, it maintains only 15 fire stations.)
Engine House #5 closed in 1930. It had a second life as a filling station (Pure Oil) and auto body shop from the late 1940s to the middle 1960s. It has hosted a series of restaurants since the late 1970s, the Happy Gnome being by far the longest-lasting. You can see traces of the original bays – imagine the horse teams and shining engines -- in the two big windows facing Selby.
]]>The sport of curling involves sliding 42-pound stones of polished granite down a sheet of expertly prepared ice towards a target. One team member launches the rock in a slow, majestic procession, while others influence its trajectory with frantic broomstrokes of the ice in its path. It began as an outdoor sport, probably in 17th century Scotland, and in due course made its way to the chilly regions of North America.
The first known St. Paul curling competition took place on the Mississippi River near Navy Island, downtown, on Christmas 1885. The game was between the St. Paul Curling Club, founded the month before Christmas, and the upstart Nushka Club, founded that very week. The outcome of the game was never recorded.
There followed a period of popularity, with ice sheets popping up around town, clubs coming and going, and tournaments (bonspiels) held in the St. Paul Winter Carnival. The St. Paul Club built its first clubhouse on Navy (then Raspberry) Island in 1891. In the era before manufactured ice, curling seasons could be unpredictable, as they required not only sustained cold weather but also expert ice technicians. The Depression of the 1890s took a toll and the St. Club folded in 1903. Former members created the Capitol City Club the following year.
The Nushka Club built the first clubhouse on the Selby Avenue site in 1903. The Capitol City Club and Nushka Clubs merged in 1912 as the revived St. Paul Curling Club and built the current building in 1913; it has remained open since. Artificial ice sheets were installed in 1939.
The St. Paul Curling Club is believed to be the biggest in the country, with over 1200 members. Curling thrives once again.
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