St. Paul’s Frogtown neighborhood has always been one of the city’s succession neighborhoods, welcoming generation after generation of newcomers to the capital city and the United States. Frogtown also…

Located in the North End neighborhood, Rice Street began as a commercial corridor that served St. Paul’s working class. Rice Street is unassuming; when it was rushed into being, more than a century…

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…

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…

Horseshoer seems like a little bit of an exotic profession today, but in the 19th century--in fact until the 1920's--a motorized truck could not haul as much weight as a draft horse and wagon. While…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

“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,…

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…

- 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…

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.…

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…

The intersection of Lexington and Marshall represents two points of entry by African Americans: education and athletic achievement. In Saint Paul, access to educational institutions was generally…

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…

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…

The State Capitol and Mall represent an interesting political history for Minnesota's African Americans. In 1868, the state's black population reached 759 people. That year, the state amended its…

People arriving in Saint Paul between 1900 and 1940 generally came by train through the Union Depot. In its heyday, this neoclassical structure served 282 trains and 20,000 passengers daily. The depot…