On October 16, 2006, two new sculptures were officially dedicated in Indian Mounds Park. They were part of the Minnesota Rocks! International Stone Carving Symposium. It was a Public Art Saint Paul program which brought sculptors from around the…

The Saint Paul Municipal Forest is located at the eastern edge of Indian Mounds Park. Most people in the city and even in Dayton’s Bluff know that it exists as a separate entity. The twenty-five acre site is located along Burns Avenue and is…

Air travel was changing from a novelty to a serious form of transportation by the 1920’s. The federal government supported this new industry by paying to have planes deliver mail. Over 600 airway beacons were constructed by the post Office and the…

In 1900, because of large attendance in the park, a small refreshment pavilion was built at Earl Street. It was sometimes used for concerts. Unfortunately, it was burned down the next year “evidently the work of vandalism.” The current pavilion…

Some 12,000 years ago, groups of people followed the big game up the Mississippi River as the glaciers melted. If they happened to stop in what is today’s Indian Mounds Park they must have been awed by the panorama. There was a huge waterfall that…

William Schornstein was a prominent member of the local German American community. The first mention in the historic record said that listed him as a bartender at the Tivoli, a downtown tavern. By the 1880’s he had a combination saloon and grocery…

Sitting high on a hill, this red brick and sandstone Queen Anne house at 827 Mound Street can easily be seen by cars zipping along the nearby freeway. It was constructed in 1891 by Peter and Marie Giesen. Peter Giesen came to St. Paul from Germany…

Germans were one of the earliest immigrant groups that came to Saint Paul. As many of them became prosperous, they moved into Dayton’s Bluff and built substantial homes for their families. Several, including the home of Adolph and Anna Muench, were…

Edward Devitt (1911-1992) was born into an Irish working class family in Saint Paul. He attended Van Buren Elementary School where he was a younger schoolmate of Warren Burger and Harry Blackmun. After the death of his father in 1921, the family…

Harry Blackmun (1908-1999) and his family lived at 847 East Fourth Street after they moved to St. Paul from southern Illinois in 1910. His father was a businessman who owned nearby groceries at 198 Bates and 376 Maria. Harry attended Van Buren…

Former chief justice of the U. S. Supreme Court Warren Burger (1907-1995) lived with his six siblings in a two-bedroom cottage at 695 Conway from 1914 to 1933. His father worked as a railway cargo inspector and sometime traveling salesman so the…

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.” …

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…

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…

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…

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…

When German immigrant and former butcher/saloon owner Theodore Hamm bought a struggling business on Phalen Creek in St. Paul in 1864, would he have thought it would become one of the largest breweries in the country? That first year there were five…