St. Cloud is a city and county seat of Stearns County in central
Minnesota, United States. The city also extends into Benton and
Sherburne counties. In 2020, St. Cloud had a population of
68,881.
St. Cloud, whose metropolitan area has
approximately 196,000 residents, is home to St. Cloud State
University (SCSU) and St. Cloud Technical College.
St. Cloud is approximately 95-110 kilometers northwest of the Twin Cities, which it is connected to via Interstate 94 and the U.S. Hwy 10 is connected. The Mississippi River flows through St. Cloud. According to the United States Census Bureau, the city's area is 80.1 km².
St. Cloud's attractions include:
the Munsinger Gardens and Clemens
Gardens
the Stearns History Museum
As of the 2010 census, St. Cloud was home to 65,842 people in 25,439
households. The population density was 843 people per square kilometer.
Statistically, 2.37 people lived in each of the 25,439 households.
The racial makeup of the population was 84.6 percent White, 7.8
percent African American, 0.7 percent Native American, 3.7 percent
Asian, and 0.8 percent from other races; 2.5 percent descended from two
or more ethnic groups. Regardless of ethnicity, 2.4 percent of the
population was of Hispanic or Latino descent.
18.9 percent of the
population was under 18 years old, 70.8 percent were between 18 and 64
and 10.3 percent were 65 years or older. 48.5 percent of the population
was female.
The median annual household income was $40,687. Per
capita income was $22,871. 23.9 percent of the residents lived below the
poverty line.
Since 2006, St. Cloud has been
twinned with the Franconian town of Spalt.
The local Apollo High
School and Technical High School have a partnership with the
Walburgisgymnasium in Menden. The State University is a partner
university of the Technical University of Ingolstadt.
St. Cloud gained international prominence within the fan base of the sitcom How I Met Your Mother as it is the hometown of main character Marshall Eriksen. It is a setting in the series several times, but is presented as a smaller and more rural town than it actually is.
The present-day St. Cloud area has been occupied by various
indigenous tribes for thousands of years. Voyageurs and voyageurs
(Coureurs des bois) from New France first met the Ojibwe and Dakota
through the lucrative North American fur trade with local Native
Americans.
The Minnesota Territory was organized in 1849; the St.
Cloud area was opened to homesteaders after the Treaty of Traverse des
Sioux was signed with the Dakota in 1851.
John L. Wilson, a
Yankee from Columbia, Maine, of French Huguenot ancestry, was interested
in Napoleon. He named the settlement St. Cloud after Saint-Cloud, a
suburb of Paris where Napoleon had his favorite palace.
Saint
Cloud was used by Métis merchants as a way station for the Middle Branch
and Woods Branch of the Red River Trail, which connected the
Canadian-U.S. border at Pembina, North Dakota, with Saint Paul. The
wagon trains often consisted of several hundred oxcarts. The Métis who
brought furs, to be exchanged for supplies and brought back to their
rural villages, camped west of St. Cloud and crossed the Mississippi
River at St. Cloud or at Sauk Rapids, just north of St. Cloud.
The city of St. Cloud was incorporated in 1856, and beginning in 1853,
European-American settlers formed and developed three settlements known
as Upper Town, Middle Town, and Lower Town. Remnants of the deep canyon
that separated these three settlements can still be seen today. Middle
Town was settled primarily by German Catholic immigrants and settlers
from the eastern states. They were recruited to the area by Father
Francis Xavier Peirce, a Catholic priest who also served as a missionary
to Native Americans.
Lower Town was founded by settlers from
northern New England and the Mid-Atlantic, including former residents of
upstate New York. The Protestant settlers opposed slavery.
Upper
Town (Arcadia) was planned by General Sylvanus Lowry, a slave owner and
trader from Kentucky. He served as a member of the Territorial
Legislature from 1852 to 1853 and was elected chairman of the newly
created town council in 1856, serving for one year (the office of mayor
did not yet exist).
Jane Gray Swishelm, an abolitionist newspaper
editor who had emigrated from Pittsburgh, repeatedly attacked Lowry in
print. On one occasion, Lowry organized a "vigilance committee" that
broke into Swisshelm's newspaper office, removed her paper, and threw it
into the Mississippi River. Lowry founded a rival newspaper, the Union.
In 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision ruled that
slaves could not sue for freedom and that the Missouri Compromise was
unconstitutional. When the Civil War broke out, nearly all Southerners
left the St. Cloud area with their slaves; the 1860 census estimated the
total number of slaves in the area to be in single digits, as there were
4 million slaves. Lowry died in the city in 1865.
During the
American Civil War, many young men from St. Cloud and the surrounding
area served in the Union Army. After the war ended, many local Civil War
veterans remained heavily involved with the Grand Army branch of the
Republican Army in St. Cloud and raised funds for the construction of a
memorial statue to U.S. President Abraham Lincoln that stands near the
St. Germain Street Bridge.
For two years beginning in 1864,
Stephen Miller served as governor of Minnesota. Miller was a
"Pennsylvania German businessman," lawyer, author, active abolitionist,
and personal friend of Alexander Ramsey, who in 1860 joined Lincoln on
the Republican ticket.
Although river levels were unstable,
steamboats regularly docked at St. Cloud as part of the fur trade and
other commerce; the construction of the Coon Rapids Dam in 1912-14 ended
that service. Granite quarries have operated in the area since the
1880s, supplying granite to St. Cloud. Cloud's nickname is "The Granite
City."
In 1917, Samuel Pandolfo started the Pan Motor Company in
St. Cloud. He claimed that his company's Pan cars would make St. Cloud
the new Detroit, but the company failed at a time when resources were
being directed to World War I. He was later convicted and imprisoned for
attempting to defraud investors.
According to documents from the
Stearns Historical Museum, more than 2,000 residents of the
predominantly German-American St. Cloud area served in the U.S. Army
against their country during World War I. On January 26, 1918, President
Woodrow Wilson sent a letter to Bishop Joseph Francis Bush, who was a
member of the St. Cloud community, thanked him for his support of the
war effort.
Stephen Miller (1816–1881), Governor of Minnesota
George Ross
Smith (1864–1952), politician
Louis L. Collins (1882–1950),
politician
June Marlowe (1903–1984), actress
Gig Young
(1913–1978), actor
Ed Henry (1921–2010), political scientist,
university lecturer and local politician
David Durenberger
(1934–2023), politician
Greg Mortenson (born 1957), philanthropist
Joel Gretsch (born 1963), actor
Ginger Helgeson-Nielsen (born 1968),
tennis player
Cory Laylin (born 1970), ice hockey player
Kurt
Sauer (born 1981), ice hockey player
Chris Harrington (born 1982),
ice hockey player
Michael Sauer (born 1987), ice hockey player
Anne Schleper (born 1990), ice hockey player
Nate Schmidt (born
1991), ice hockey player