For hundreds of years, Dakota people lived in the area that would become St. Paul. They migrated with the seasons, but they considered several sites to be spiritual centers, and they buried their ancestors on the cliffs overlooking the Mississippi River. As Euro-American settlement grew in St. Paul and throughout the region, Dakota people became the victims of ethnic cleansing, leading to the US-Dakota War of 1862 in southern Minnesota. In its aftermath, the East Side became an immigrant working- class community. And it continues to play this role today.
Beginning in the 1850s, Swedish immigrants to St. Paul built a DIY community (“Swede Hollow”), which was home to more than one thousand people by 1880. Over the second half of the nineteenth century, as the city and the East Side developed, second- and third-generation Swedish Americans learned skilled trades, organized into unions, founded churches, and moved out of the...
