St. Paul


Book Description

A concise history, featuring stories that are familiar, surprising, and sure to change the way you see Minnesota's capitol city.




Minneapolis-St. Paul Then and Now


Book Description

Celebrating America's favorite cityscapes, this series combines historic interest and contemporary beauty. Then and Now features fascinating archival photographs contrasted with specially commissioned, full-color images of the same scene today. A visual lesson in the historic changes of our greatest urban landscapes.




St. Paul's Historic Summit Avenue


Book Description

Well known as the most prestigious and beautiful street in the Twin Cities, Summit Avenue runs past the opulent mansion of railroad tycoon James J. Hill, an early home of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and several residences designed by renowned architect Cass Gilbert. In its heyday the four-and-one-half-mile-long boulevard included 13 churches, 9 schools, and 440 residences, 373 of which survive. St. Paul's Historic Summit Avenue highlights the fascinating story of this boulevard, from its pre-Civil War origins, when the area was still considered wilderness, to its fashionable height at the turn of the century. Ernest R. Sandeen discusses the preservation of Summit Avenue and takes readers on a walking tour of the first and grandest mile of the street, beginning with the Cathedral of St. Paul. A second walking tour gives the reader Fitzgerald's Summit Avenue, including excerpts from his notebooks and stories describing the area. The book concludes with an index of Summit Avenue houses built through the 1970s. Before his death in 1982, Ernest R. Sandeen was the James Wallace Professor of History and codirector of the Living Historical Museum at Macalester College. He served as a member of St. Paul's Historic Preservation Commission and as a partner in Lanegran, Richter, and Sandeen, an architectural preservation, design, and land-use firm.




Irish in Minnesota


Book Description

As farmers and laborers, policemen and politicians, maids and seamstresses, Irish immigrants' hard work helped to build the state. Author Ann Regan examines their history and tells the diverse stories of the Irish in Minnesota.




The Street Where You Live


Book Description

More than one thousand entries and more than one hundred photographs present an entertaining history of the often quirky origins of St. Paul place names, from A Street to Zimmermann Place and including parks, lakes, streams, roads, cemeteries, bridges, neighborhoods, and many other landmarks. Original.




The St. Paul Saints


Book Description

From Pig's Eye to a pig on the field, celebrate the St. Paul Saints--their players, owners, managers, fans, and ballparks old and new--and the history of baseball in the capital city!




Days of Rondo


Book Description

Evelyn Fairbanks lived along Rondo Avenue-the heart of St. Paul's largest black community-from the 1930s through the 1950s. Her memoir tells warm and human stories recalling those years in a vibrant community that vanished with the coming of the freeways in the 1960s.




Minneapolis and St. Paul in Vintage Postcards


Book Description

During the first half of the 20th century, communication by postcard was an inexpensive and popular means of exchanging travel stories, news, and gossip across the United States. The postcard, for just a few cents, connected friends and loved-ones separated by hundreds of miles. Today, we treasure these little correspondences of yesteryear as unique glimpses into the long-lost places of a long-gone era. Minneapolis and St. Paul in Vintage Postcards captures this historic era of Minnesota's "twin cities" through 200 classic postcard images. Inside will be found views of St. Paul's Hotel Ryan, providing a rare glimpse into a once-famous landmark that no longer stands. A picture of a solitary 1911 automobile traveling along Minneapolis' popular Lake Calhoun Drive will remind us of how one may have gone to-and-fro at the start of the last century. And the scene of a well-dressed Minnesota family at Minnehaha Falls shows us that this site was as popular among tourists in 1908, when the image was taken, as it is today.




Minnesota's Oldest Murder Mystery


Book Description

On September 27, 1839, the battered body of a middle-aged Irishman was found by some Dakota Indian boys. The corpse washed up along the Mississippi River shore, about seven miles downstream from Fort Snelling near the ancient Indian landmark the non-Indians called Carver's Cave. It was the body of Sgt. John Hays, a popular former soldier, who, prior to his disappearance twenty-one days earlier, had been sharing a log shanty a few miles upriver from the cave with his friend and business partner, Edward Phelan (or Phalen). Before the year was over, Phelan was arrested and charged with the murder of his friend. This is the first book to focus on this historic murder and the first thorough biography of Phelan, a notorious pioneer intimately involved in the making of St. Paul and founding of Minnesota. Was he guilty? All investigative reports and records of Phelan's trial were mysteriously lost and no newspapers covered the story. However, in 1994, St. Paul historian Gary Brueggemann made an amazing discovery in the Minnesota Historical Society archives: hidden in the papers of Joseph R. Brown was Brown's original Justice of the Peace casebook which included his handwritten transcription of the Hay's murder hearing. Using this record, other primary sources, and drawing from decades of studying Minnesota and St. Paul history, the author theorizes a logical solution to Minnesota's oldest unsolved murder. Book jacket.




Creating Minnesota


Book Description

Winner of a Spur Award, presented by the Western Writers of America (WWA), for the Best Western Nonfiction Historical Book. Renowned historian Annette Atkins presents a fresh understanding of how a complex and modern Minnesota came into being in Creating Minnesota. Each chapter of this innovative state history focuses on a telling detail, a revealing incident, or a meaningful issue that illuminates a larger event, social trends, or politics during a period in our past. A three-act play about Minnesota's statehood vividly depicts the competing interests of Natives, traders, and politicians who lived in the same territory but moved in different worlds. Oranges are the focal point of a chapter about railroads and transportation: how did a St. Paul family manage to celebrate their 1898 Christmas with fruit that grew no closer than 1,500 miles from their home? A photo essay brings to life three communities of the 1920s, seen through the lenses of local and itinerant photographers. The much-sought state fish helps to explain the new Minnesota, where pan-fried walleye and walleye quesadillas coexist on the same north woods menu. In Creating Minnesota Atkins invites readers to experience the texture of people's lives through the decades, offering a fascinating and unparalleled approach to the history of our state.