Minneapolis and Saint Paul Wall Art

Minnesota’s largest city and state capital combine to form the Twin Cities metropolitan area of the state. The city of Minneapolis (population 413,000) was incorporated in 1867 and was largely developed around the St. Anthony’s Fall geographic area along the Mississippi River. The name “Minneapolis” was conceived by Charles Hoag, combining the words “Mni” (a Dakota Sioux word for water) and “Polis”, the Greek word for city. In its early days, Minneapolis as a city originally thrived on lumber and sawmills powered by the St. Anthony’s Falls. In the late 19th century, Cadwallader C. Washburn built a modern flour mill for the company that would become General Mills and soon after, Charles A. Pillsbury, the founder of the Pillsbury Company would follow suit and build another flour mill leading Minneapolis to become the “Flour Mill Capital of the World”. Saint Paul (population 304,000) was founded at the junction of the Mississippi and Minnesota river within proximity of the military base, Fort Snelling. Saint Paul starting as a fur-trading and whiskey trading center in the early 1800s. The city was named for Paul the Apostle in 1841 and incorporated as a city and becoming the capital of Minnesota when the state was admitted to the union in 1858. The Minnesota State Capitol building was completed in 1905. Like its neighbor, Minneapolis, Saint Paul’s role as a trade and transportation center was due in part to its settlement on the Mississippi, although its role was more towards finance and commerce and not industrialization. Two major railways, the Great Northern and Northern Pacific were once headquartered in Saint Paul and steamboats carried cargo and passengers into the city. Saint Paul was also home to a large European population as settlers came from Germany, Sweden, Norway, Poland, the Netherlands, among other countries. Today, the Twin Cities is the second-largest economic center in the U.S. Midwest, and the largest economic center between Seattle and Chicago. Fortune 500 companies such as Target, Xcel Energy and many financial service companies are headquartered here. Minneapolis and St. Paul also boast a large number of post-secondary education institutions, but none quite as large as the University of Minnesota, where over 50,000 students attend 20 different schools, colleges, and institutes inside the 4th largest school campus in the U.S.

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