There is a misconception that the City of St. Paul grew out of a downtown district. Through the 1800s nothing could be further from the truth—both then, and now. Rather two breaks in the bluffs of the Mississippi River set history in motion. They became the Lower and Upper Landings and hubs of the future city.
The Mississippi river gorge’s bluffs were carved out by the great melted floods of the glaciers. The shores and terraces above were littered with bogs, marshes and the Great Woods. Between the confluence at Bdote and Phelan Creek, no Native villages lined the eastern bluff of the Mississippi: the bluffs were inaccessible and inhospitable.
In the early 1800s French and Native fur traders, the métis, settled the Lower Landing in small farms out of Mendota near the Dakota village of Shák’pí/Shakopee. The language was a mix of French and Dakota, though they were soon overwhelmed by American entrepreneurs and speculators from the east. The métis left to found Osseo and Little Canada, leaving the Americans and the English language to predominate. When the American Fur Company went bankrupt under Henry Sibley in 1842, the Lower Landing rose in prominence as a more accessible transportation hub though it was swampy and subject to flooding.
Riverfront topography became altered to provide access for the wagons up the bluffs and for steamship landings. At the Lower Landing, Baptist Hill was leveled at the foot of Jackson Street. Its soil and rock were used to fill its wetlands in preparation for the warehouses to come. It was the northernmost accessible landing between the Mississippi River’s 80-foot high bluffs and became a center for transportation, manufacturing and wholesaling companies serving the entire Upper Midwest. James C. Burbank’s Northwestern Express Company wharf boat and storehouses began at the Upper Landing, but in 1855 he relocated to the Lower. His contemporary, James Jerome Hill (1838 –1916) likewise centered his Great Northern Railway…