A History of Change

For thousands of years Native Americans traveled through and used this landscape before Euro-Americans settled New Canada Township in the late 1850s. J.W.S. Frost bought land here in 1865 and began farming, and the area drew dairy and truck farming as well as leisure use around Lake Phalen. As railroads began crisscrossing the countryside, two lines established a junction and depots just blocks northeast, leading William Dawson to plat Gladstone on August 27, 1886, in hopes that the new town would rival St. Paul. In 1887 the St. Paul & Duluth Railroad selected Gladstone for a new maintenance yard, and by the turn of the 20th century a vibrant community had formed, with some local businesses still carrying the Gladstone name. Gladstone and the Shops never reached the prosperity their founders had envisioned; by 1915 the Shops had been relocated, the land was leased to several companies including Seeger Refrigeration, later named Whirlpool, and by 1979 the remaining buildings were demolished. Maplewood residents approved a referendum in 1993 to acquire and preserve open space, and Gladstone Savanna was among the first sites purchased. William Dawson, Sr., the Irish-born first mayor of St. Paul, business owner, and banker, bought and platted 574 acres for the Gladstone Land Company in 1886, helped secure a depot and railroad Shops, and named the town for British statesman William Gladstone. Other employers also shaped the community: the Ramsey County Poor Farm, built a mile east in 1885, housed 74 paupers and employed more than a dozen men and women a decade later, while the St. Paul Plow Works moved to the nearby railroad junction in 1887 and manufactured farm implements. Many workers at the Gladstone Shops and Plow Works lived in Gladstone, whose 1895 population was largely Minnesota- and U.S.-born residents along with German, Swedish, Norwegian, and Irish immigrants; the Shops relied on raw materials shipped from hundreds of miles away, including coal from Maryland and Ohio and iron smelted and shipped from Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York.

Maplewood, Minnesota · United States