ST. CLOUD

A short history of St. Cloud

What is now the St. Cloud area was occupied by various Indigenous peoples for thousands of years. Voyageurs and coureurs des bois from New France first encountered the Ojibwe and Dakota through the highly profitable North American fur trade with local Native American peoples.

The Minnesota Territory was organized in 1849. The St. Cloud area opened up to homesteading after the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux was signed with the Dakota people in 1851. John L. Wilson, a Yankee homesteader from Columbia, Maine, with French Huguenot ancestry and an interest in Napoleon, named the settlement St. Cloud after Saint-Cloud, the Paris suburb where Napoleon had his favorite palace.

St. Cloud was a waystation on the Middle and Woods branches of the Red River Trails used by Métis traders between the Canada–U.S. border at Pembina, North Dakota, and Saint Paul, Minnesota. The cart trains often consisted of hundreds of oxcarts known as Red River carts. The Métis, bringing furs to trade for supplies to take back to their rural settlements, camped west of the city and crossed the Mississippi in St. Cloud or just to the north in Sauk Rapids.

The City of St. Cloud was incorporated in 1856. It developed from three distinct settlements, known as Upper Town, Middle Town, and Lower Town, that European-American settlers established starting in 1853. Remnants of the deep ravines that separated the three are still visible today. Middle Town was settled primarily by German Catholic immigrants and migrants from eastern states, who were recruited to the region by Father Francis Xavier Pierz, a Catholic priest who also ministered as a missionary to Native Americans.

Lower Town was founded by settlers from the Northern Tier of New England and the mid-Atlantic states, including former residents of upstate New York. Its Protestant settlers opposed slavery. Upper Town, or Arcadia, was plotted by General Sylvanus Lowry, a slaveholder and trader from Kentucky who brought slaves with him, although Minnesota was organized as a free territory. He served on the territorial council from 1852 to 1853 and was elected president of the newly formed town council in 1856, serving for one year (the office of mayor did not yet exist).

Jane Grey Swisshelm, an abolitionist newspaper editor who had migrated from Pittsburgh, repeatedly attacked Lowry in print. At one point Lowry organized a "Committee of Vigilance" that broke into Swisshelm's newspaper office and removed her press, throwing it into the Mississippi River. Lowry started a rival paper, The Union. In 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott that slaves could not file freedom suits and found the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, so the territory's prohibition against slavery became unenforceable. Nearly all Southerners left the St. Cloud area when the Civil War broke out, taking their slaves with them. The number of slaves in the community was estimated in single digits at the 1860 census. Lowry died in the city in 1865.

Many young men from St. Cloud and the surrounding area served in the Union Army during the American Civil War. After it ended, many local Civil War veterans remained heavily involved in St. Cloud's chapter of the Grand Army of the Republic, and raised money for the building of a statue in memory of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln that still stands near the St. Germain Street bridge. Beginning in 1864, Stephen Miller served a two-year term as Minnesota governor, the only citizen of St. Cloud ever to hold the office. Miller was a "Pennsylvania German businessman", lawyer, writer, active abolitionist, and personal friend of Alexander Ramsey. He was on the state's Republican electoral ticket with Lincoln in 1860.

Steamboats regularly docked at St. Cloud as part of the fur trade and other commerce, although river levels were not reliable. This ended with the construction of the Coon Rapids Dam in 1912–14. Granite quarries have operated in the area since the 1880s, giving St. Cloud its nickname, "The Granite City". In 1917, Samuel Pandolfo started the Pan Motor Company in St. Cloud. He claimed his Pan-Cars would make St. Cloud the new Detroit, but the company failed at a time when resources were directed toward the World War I effort. He was later convicted and imprisoned for attempting to defraud investors.

According to documents at the Stearns History Museum, more than 2,000 residents from the heavily German-American St. Cloud area served in the U.S. military against their ancestral homeland during World War I. On January 26, 1918, President Woodrow Wilson wrote a letter to Bishop Joseph Francis Busch thanking him for his support of the war effort.

Adapted (trimmed) from the Wikipedia article St. Cloud, Minnesota, revision 1376918473 by its contributors, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.