The Saintly City: Where the Paper Trail Begins

I have never been to St. Paul.

That's the strange thing about writing this post. Most of the places in this series are ones I've stood in myself, places my dad or my grandmother described from memory, places that live in family stories passed down at the kitchen table. St. Paul isn't one of those. I know it only from ship manifests, census records, and city directories. It's the first American address my great-grandmother ever had, and I've never set foot there.

Many branches of my Norwegian family first arrived there. Some made it their home, others homesteaded to South Dakota, North Dakota, or places further north in Minnesota. Others I've lost track of entirely, scattered into the paper trail the way families do. But before any of that happened, before anyone claimed a homestead or built a barn, they all passed through St. Paul first.

It turns out that's not unusual. It's practically the rule.

It wasn’t an accident of geography that brought them there. St. Paul sat at the absolute head of navigation on the Mississippi River, the final, rocky point where steamboats could travel north before the river turned into impassable rapids. Long before it was an elegant state capital, it was a rough-and-tumble settlement known as "Pig's Eye." It was named after Pierre "Pig's Eye" Parrant, a crooked-eyed, bootlegging whiskey trader who set up a shack at the river landing in the 1830s.  

Image credit: Albert Ruger, Chicago Lithographing Co., 1867. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division. [1, 2, 3]

The town might still be called Pig's Eye today if a French Catholic priest named Father Lucien Galtier hadn't arrived in 1841. Appalled by the settlement's rowdy reputation and its unholy nickname, he built a simple log chapel on the bluffs and dedicated it to Saint Paul. He famously declared that the growing town should be known by no other name, effectively converting "Pig's Eye" into "The Saintly City."  

By the turn of the century, the mud and whiskey shanties were long gone. Railroad titans like James J. Hill had laid thousands of miles of steel, turning the city into the undisputed engine room of the Northwest and a massive launching pad sending thousands of newcomers out onto the prairie.

St. Paul in the early 1900s was one of the great landing grounds for Norwegian immigration into the upper Midwest. The original Union Depot processed thousands of new arrivals a year. It was a chaotic, cavernous maze of languages where land agents shouted about Dakota territory, streets veered off at odd forty-five-degree angles to match the river bends, and families stepped off trains into a city three stories taller and ten times louder than anything they'd left behind.

The air in St. Paul didn't taste like the air in Norway. It tasted of coal smoke, hot grease, and the breath of ten thousand strangers.

That's a line from The Sunstone Path, describing that exact moment of stepping off the railroad platform, and it's about as close as I'll get to spoiling anything. I'll say this much: St. Paul is one of the real settings woven into the book, and the research kept surprising me at every turn. For a lot of Norwegian families, St. Paul wasn't the destination. It was the decompression chamber. A place to catch your breath, earn a little money, and figure out what came next before the real journey west began.

By Unknown author - Minnesota Historical Society Visual Resources CollectionPhotograph Collection ca. 1890Location no. MR2.9 SP8 p90Negative no. 2255-B, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42484164

What surprised me most in the research is how much of the city Norwegian immigrants built with their own hands. Carpenters and masons found steady work raising St. Paul up from the bluffs almost as fast as new arrivals could get off the train. The grand Queen Anne mansions along Cathedral Hill and Summit Avenue. Commercial blocks downtown. Entire church congregations, framed and bricked by the same hands that would later break sod on the prairie. If you know where to look, you can still see it.

Take 1902. It was a brutal year to need heat. The anthracite coal strike back east dragged on from May to October, and by the time it was settled, coal prices had tripled in cities across the country. Across the country, some families resorted to burning furniture to stay warm. President Roosevelt himself stepped in to broker a resolution, the first time a sitting president had ever intervened directly in a labor dispute. St. Paul felt every bit of it. Drafty houses. Rationed coal deliveries. A hard, watchful kind of winter.

And then there's Frogtown, a neighborhood I fell a little in love with while researching this post. Officially platted as Thomas-Dale, it earned its nickname from the chorus of frogs that used to sing through its swampy lowlands before the wetlands were filled. Frogtown became a bustling, working-class haven for waves of Norwegian, German, Polish, and Irish immigrants building lives on modest wages from the nearby Great Northern railroad shops.

Small wood-frame cottages lined the muddy streets while electric streetcar lines hummed down University Avenue.

Right in the middle of it stood a real anchor for the community: Trinity Norwegian Evangelical Lutheran Church at 515 North Farrington Street. The congregation had moved to Frogtown in 1885, but they lost their building to a devastating fire in 1902. They rebuilt with incredible speed, erecting a beautiful brick building on a solid limestone foundation. Designed in the shape of a cross, it featured a tall wooden spire, delicate rooftop embellishments, and glowing stained-glass windows. They worked fast enough to have the doors open again by Christmas.

For newly arrived Norwegian immigrants, Trinity Norwegian Evangelical Lutheran Church offered more than a place of worship, it offered community, familiarity, and hope.

The new brick building looked imposing against the dark sky. Its tall wooden spire reached up like a finger pointing toward the stars, and the Gothic windows glowed with the light of hundreds of candles from within.

I think about that spire a lot. It felt like the right kind of place for a family who had just crossed an ocean to land in. St. Paul in 1902 was a city of contrasts. Mansions a few blocks from immigrant cottages. Streetcars gliding past horse-drawn drays. Norwegian hymns sung inside brand-new brick churches built by Norwegian hands, while half the conversations on the street outside still happened in the old language. Local Scandinavian newspapers like the St. Paul Tidende were freshly rolling off the local presses, helping newcomers navigate an environment that was becoming American while staying exactly what it was, all at the same time.

It was a city constantly transforming itself, a reality anchored by the massive white structure rising over Wabasha Hill. Construction on the new Minnesota State Capitol had been underway since 1896, drawing hundreds of skilled local immigrant tradesmen, stonecutters, and laborers. For a family arriving at the turn of the century, the sight of that immense marble dome slowly taking shape behind a forest of wooden scaffolding and steam cranes was a striking reminder of just how fast the new world was building itself up from the ground.

Minnesota State Capitol, Saint Paul, Minnesota, circa 1908. Photograph by the Detroit Publishing Co. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

If I were to travel to St. Paul today, I would find a city that has kept its promise as a gateway. The historic Union Depot has been beautifully restored, its neoclassical architecture humming once again with light rail, Amtrak trains, and modern travelers.

And if I tracked down that old brick church at 515 North Farrington, I wouldn't hear Norwegian hymns drifting out into the evening air. Over the decades, the story of St. Paul naturally shifted. As those original Scandinavian immigrants established themselves, integrated, learned English, and eventually moved outward to newer suburbs or prairie homesteads, they left Frogtown behind.

But Frogtown never stopped doing what it does best: acting as a landing pad for the next generation of new Americans. In the decades that followed, the shores people were leaving changed. New waves of Hmong, Vietnamese, and East African immigrants moved into the neighborhood, renting those same wood-frame cottages and walking the same streets.

Today, that historic 1902 brick church belongs to the Ebenezer Oromo Evangelical Church, serving a thriving Ethiopian immigrant community. The language echoing inside those gothic windows is completely different now, but the soul of the building hasn't shifted an inch. It is still a sanctuary for people who crossed an ocean to start over.

I may never stand on the old steam platforms, walk the bluffs, or find my ancestors' exact footsteps. But I know the place now, in the particular way you come to know somewhere through research and imagination rather than memory. Some places become part of a family long before anyone in that family ever sees them for themselves.

Photo by weston m on Unsplash

For my family, St. Paul wasn't the destination. It was the first breath taken on new ground. Everything after that is the story I'm still writing.

This is only the beginning.

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