150 years ago...
If Bridgeland appears to take on an added glow this month, it’s probably just the birthday candles. Minneapolis has a lot of them this year — 150 to be exact, the same number that graces the cake of the state of Minnesota, which is in the midst of a larger, statewide celebration this year.
The city’s historic anniversary coincides with the annual Aquatennial events, July 18–27. As Minneapolis prepares to mark its sesquicentennial (officially July 20), we at The Bridge decided to take a look back at what Bridgeland was like 150 years ago. We enlisted Prospect Park resident Susan Larson-Fleming, the archivist at the Hennepin History Museum, for research assistance.
Some might argue that the city’s “birthday” actually occurred in 1856, when an act of the Minnesota Territorial Legislature first allowed Minneapolis to incorporate as a town. This date was referenced when the city observed its centennial back in 1956. This year’s celebration, however, commemorates the 150th anniversary of Minneapolis government — when the first Town Council voted to become a town.
St. Anthony Falls: the ‘nucleus’
To this day, the thunderous falls of St. Anthony are a Minneapolis landmark. But Minneapolis — and certainly Bridgeland — owes much of its existence to what is now the most famous waterfall on the Upper Mississippi.
“The fact cannot be too distinctly impressed upon the mind of the student of the history of Minneapolis that the Falls of St. Anthony constituted the nucleus around which everything clustered and was that which caused everything to cluster there,” states author Edward A. Bromley in his 1890 book, Minneapolis Album: A Photographic History of the Early Days in Minneapolis.
The 1850s marked a period of tremendous growth for the area around the present-day neighborhoods of Downtown East and Nicollet Island/East Bank, which grew out of the utilization of waterpower, and it was right around this time that the earliest saw-milling and flour-milling began. (Until their merger in 1872, two separate townships existed: St. Anthony on the east bank of the Mississippi River and Minneapolis on the west bank.)
Nowhere was this growth more visible than in the village of St. Anthony. In 1848, the entire St. Anthony township had a single store —“a small wagonload of goods that had been brought from Fort Snelling the year before… and stored in a log building,” according to The Story of Minneapolis: The River is Crossed, the second chapter in a monthly history series about the city of Minneapolis published by The Baldwin Supply Company in 1964. Little more than a decade later, dozens of businesses of every variety appeared in the 1859 edition of the St. Anthony and Minneapolis Business Directory: insurance agents, bakers, butchers, furniture dealers — many of them located on the east side of the river. As the townships grew, so did the need for lumber, which kept the local saw mills humming.
While a ferry service previously operated from Nicollet Island to the west bank, the first suspension bridge anywhere on the Mississippi River was completed Jan. 23, 1855, connecting Nicollet Island with the west bank. Although the toll bridge was removed just a few years later in 1876, it would soon be joined by a number of other bridges, including one shortly thereafter that spanned entirely from the east to the west bank.
Industry itself may have been confined to the current Downtown East and Nicollet Island/East Bank and Marcy-Holmes neighborhoods in the 1850s, but mill workers began to inhabit nearby areas in growing numbers. For example, just two decades from the time that the mills started to take off, close to 500 people — predominantly working-class mill employees — lived in the neighborhood now referred to as Cedar-Riverside.
Today, the Southeast Como neighborhood holds dozens of reminders of Minneapolis life 150 years ago. Several prominent streets in the neighborhood were named after some of Minneapolis and St. Anthony townships’ first settlers, including Tallmadge Elwell (Talmadge Avenue) and John Rollins (Rollins Avenue). Present-day Como Avenue gets its name from Como Road, a street that ran from St. Anthony township into St. Paul, built in the late 1860s.
The origins of the university
Although central to Bridgeland today, the University of Minnesota actually got its start as a preparatory school in a frame building next to the Winslow House, a grand hotel that once graced the east bank in St. Anthony. The university building was built in November 1851 “by order of the Board of Regents of the State University” before Minnesota was even a state. The school remained at the site until 1855 when the present location was selected. While financial hardship and the Civil War forced the school to close in 1858 — several months after the first building had opened on the new campus — the institution reopened a decade later, this time as a college. A map of the area from 1872 designates large portions of what is now Prospect Park, east of Southeast Oak Street, as the environmental farm of the university’s agricultural college.
The same 1870s-era map shows dozens of platted residential lots as fairgrounds in what is now the Seward neighborhood and the area south of East Franklin Avenue between 25th and 29th avenues South and East 24th Street. Beginning in the 1870s, the fairgrounds were the site of the Minneapolis Fair, held by Col. William S. King, one of the largest landowners in Minneapolis history. Today, Seward’s biennial King’s Fair is named for the former real estate mogul, who was also a Minnesota Congressman.
Before the settlers
One aspect of Minneapolis history that is absent in most European settlers’ accounts from the mid-1800s on up into the early 20th century is the history of the Dakota Mdewakanton, the area’s first residents. While an American Indian narrative was often suppressed in these selective histories, the Mdewakanton Band of the Dakota Nation undoubtedly hold a significant place in Minneapolis history. In fact, the prefix, Minne-, in the name Minneapolis, is a derivation of a Dakota word meaning “curling water” or “the waterfall.”
last revised: July 1, 2008