The Point

Peninsula Point, where the Rum and Mississippi Rivers meet, has long been a meeting place of cultures, people, and activity. American Indians used it as a campground and honored it as a sacred place, and prehistoric Indians gathered there to form hunting and war parties as they traveled the river highways in what is now Minnesota. Explorers met American Indians there while probing the land for resources and trade opportunities, and fur trappers and traders exchanged European goods for furs, pelts, and hides harvested by American Indians. Travelers, pioneers, and settlers stopped there to camp as they journeyed across the territory, with foot paths, the Red River Oxcart Trail, and the Military Road passing through Anoka near the site. New England lumbermen and timber speculators traveled the Rum and Mississippi in search of pine forests, while pineries on the upper Rum River supplied millions of logs to sawmills downstream from the point. Between 1850 and 1870, the Rum and Mississippi became working rivers for lumbermen, who went upstream in the fall to cut logs through the winter and then floated them downstream in rafts to sawmills at Anoka and at St. Anthony Falls. Logs met the boom and sawmill there, ferry boats and steamboats docked there, immigrants from New England and Europe stepped ashore there to meet new neighbors in the growing town of Anoka, Anoka families and friends gathered there for picnics and Fourth of July celebrations, and settlers built homes, businesses, and farms from lumber sawn and milled near the point.

Anoka, Minnesota · United States