“Duluth is The Zenith City of the Unsalted Seas.” That silver-tongued oratory spilled from the lips of Thomas Preston Foster, founder of the first newspaper in town, on the occasion of the Fourth of July celebration in 1869. Foster spoke before 3,500 people - six months earlier on New Year’s Day there were 14 families in Duluth which was experiencing the greatest growth spurt in the United States at the time.
French fur traders had been the first Europeans to visit the western Great Lakes back in the early 1600s. Daniel Greysolon, the Sieur de Lhut, had explored the Saint Louis River in 1679 and left his name behind for the scattering of outposts around the natural harbor. But by the middle of the 19th century it was copper and timber that was luring investors to the young settlement. Most notable was a land speculator and railroad builder out of Philadelphia named Jay Cooke.
When Cooke connected Duluth via rail to the main line of the northern continental railroad the port became the only one in the United States to be connected to both the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. There was no doubt that Foster’s Zenith City was destined to zip past Chicago and become the leading city of the American midwest. No doubt at least until the financial panic of 1873 collapsed Cooke’s empire and Duluth seemed more likely to disappear from maps altogether than emerge as a dominant metropolis.
But there was too much mineral wealth in northern Minnesota to stub Duluth out entirely. By the dawn of the 20th century the port in Duluth was handling more tonnage than New York City or Chicago. The streets were filled with millionaires and U.S. Steel invested $5 million in a new plant on the shores of Lake Superior. The high grade iron ore would play out and send Duluth’s economy spiraling downhill again but it would take more than a half century to do so.
In the latter decades of the 20th century Zenith City would resurrect itself once again as a tourist destination. A sixteen-block chunk of downtown from the glory days of the late 1800s and early 1900s was designated a National Register Historic District. More than 100 buildings arrayed along Superior and First streets provide a classroom in Victorian and Classical Revival architecture. Most of our walking tour will concentrate along those streets but we will start with landmarks of civic pride from a more recent era...
Sawmilling was the number one industry in Minnesota in 1867 when Minneapolis was incorporated as a city but John Pillsbury, who had settled in St. Anthony’s Falls in 1853, believed the new reaper invented by Cyrus McCormick would make flour milling the new big business. Pillsbury persuaded his nephew Charles Alfred Pillsbury to bring his new bride to join him in milling flour. Their first venture was a broken-down 250-barrel Minneapolis flour mill that the Minneapolis business community considered a risky investment, at best. After all, in the heart of “America’s Bread Basket,” Minnesota was actually importing flour at the time. Minnesota wheat was hard, brittle and produced inferior flour. It cost more to make and sold for less than other Midwest flours. Not a winning combination.
The Dartmouth-educated Charles Pillsbury, however, saw potential in the unpopular grain. He believed he could actually make superior flour from the gluten-rich kernels. He installed a new purifier that blew the bran out of the wheat kernel and made a $6000 profit in his first year. Charles took the profits and started a new firm, C.A. Pillsbury & Co., in 1872 and by 1880 he was operating the largest flour mill on earth. Minneapolis was about to become the flour capital of the world.
For the next 50 years Minneapolis boomed, building up and out to handle the needs of a population that grew from 13,000 to more than 450,000 in those years. But the city was just as eager to tear down as it had been to build up. An eager participant in urban renewal, the city demolished some 200 buildings in the 1950s and 1960s, clearing away about half of downtown.
Our walking tour of downtown Minneapolis will sift among the newish towers and find the landmarks still standing. Along the way we will see more statues dedicated to made up fictional characters than those honoring real people and we will start with characters from America’s most popular comic strip...
Were it not for an offended Catholic priest Minnesota would today boast the most memorable of all state capital names...
The Dakota Indians considered the spot at the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers the center of the world; European visitors recognized its strategic importance for trade and defense. On September 21, 1805 Zebulon Pike picked up 100,000 acres for $200 of trinkets, a keg of whiskey and the promise of a trading post. Colonel Josiah Snelling shaped the post into a military fort when he arrived in 1820 and Fort Snelling operated as through World War II and became the first National Historic Landmark in Minnesota in 1960.
No, the town that would become the capital was never named Snelling.
Just downstream from the fort a well-traveled and weary French Canadian fur trader named Pierre Parrant, then in his sixties and blind in one eye, staked a claim in 1832 to a patch of land at the entrance of a cave on the north bank of the Mississippi River. In addition to shelter the cave had the singular advantage of a spring which Parrant used to distill whiskey. “Pig’s Eye” Parrant found ready customers in the soldiers from Fort Snelling and rivermen plying the Mississippi and the community that grew up around Pig’s Eye’s tavern took the same handle. Local residents had no qualms about living in Pigs Eye but when Catholic priestLucien Galtier arrived he declared that in no way would his chapel bear the name of such a man of ill reputation. He named his chapel after his favorite saint and soon the settlement had jettisoned its first resident in favor of Paul the Apostle.
The Minnesota Territory was formalized in 1849 and St. Paul selected as its capital. As Minnesota prepared for statehood in 1858 a bill was passed to establish the capital in St. Peter on land owned by the Territorial Governor Willis A. Gorman. According to the story, legislator Joseph J. Rolette spirited the physical bill away and disappeared for a week, returning only after it was too late for the governor to sign the bill into law. Today, St. Paul is the second largest city in Minnesota with a population of a quarter of a million and St. Peter remains a small rural town with some 10,000 inhabitants.
While Minneapolis evolved as a place to make things, St. Paul’s identity was forged in finance and business. Our walking tour of downtown St. Paul will find landmarks erected a century ago by the city’s biggest players on the financial stage but we’ll start with a few figures who never paid much mind to matters like that, characters from America’s most popular comic strip...