Building the "Skally"

The St. Paul & Duluth Roundhouse at the Gladstone Shops was a round engine house for repairing and storing locomotives, with a turntable that allowed efficient engine movement and redirection. Completed in 1888, the roundhouse had 25 stalls, and archaeologists found evidence of maintenance pits and confirmed that the turntable had been removed after work was moved to other repair shops by 1915. Gladstone Savanna was once a thriving railroad maintenance yard tied to the line linking St. Paul and Duluth, a connection envisioned in 1857 but delayed by financial panics and the Civil War until sustained construction began in the late 1860s. At 11:35 p.m. on August 1, 1870, the first Lake Superior & Mississippi Railroad train arrived in Duluth, cutting days off travel, shifting commerce from the Mississippi River to Lake Superior, and helping make Duluth the fastest growing city in the nation. The line was long known as the "Skally," a nickname variously attributed to Irish, Italian, and Swedish immigrants. Financial difficulties led to the railroad's reorganization as the St. Paul & Duluth Railroad in 1877, and over its 23 years the company operated more than 2,500 locomotives and cars, many built at the Gladstone Shops, before being purchased by the Northern Pacific Railway in 1900 and eventually becoming part of the Burlington Northern Railway system until the tracks were discontinued in 1987. Expansion beginning in June 1887 brought new maintenance shops to Gladstone because it was the first level ground north of St. Paul along the line, already had a depot, and came with 30 bonus acres; founder William Dawson recognized the shops' potential to improve local prosperity, construction began in August, and Gladstone was platted weeks later. The shops employed more than 100 men in occupations including railroad blacksmiths, firemen, painters, car repairers, molders, boiler workers, coal heavers, station agents, engineers, and telegraph operators. The St. Paul to Duluth line was made possible in part by William Banning, who became Lake Superior & Mississippi president in 1864, and by Philadelphia banker Jay Cooke, whose investment helped secure the Duluth route.

Maplewood, Minnesota · United States