How did Minneapolis get its name?
The debate over a name for the baby burg was once so fierce that citizens had to “agree to disagree.”
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Naming a city is tricky business.
Duluth took its name from a French explorer. St. Paul paid homage to an apostle. Minneapolis took a different route, merging the Dakota and Greek words for water and city into an entirely new moniker.
But that was only after the city’s residents soundly rejected the original name: Albion.
Reader Mike Sherer learned about the Albion name change in an article about the John H. Stevens House — where the decision occurred. He was surprised to hear the city once had another name and asked Curious Minnesota, the Star Tribune’s reader-generated reporting project, for the full story.
“I have long nurtured a curiosity about how places get named and how those names get changed,” said Sherer, who lived in the Twin Cities for nearly two decades and now resides in Iowa.
Before Minneapolis got its present name, settlers in the baby burg could not see eye to eye on what to call the place. Opposing opinions were so entrenched that folks had decided to “agree to disagree on any name,” according to a memoir by Stevens, who built the first frame house in the settlement.
Creation of Albion, Minn.
Stevens built his house in 1850 on what was then part of Fort Snelling Military Reservation, across the Mississippi River from the burgeoning town of St. Anthony. The house became a popular gathering place for the residents of the settlement that emerged around it.
It’s where the first election in Hennepin County was held in 1852, and it’s where the county’s newly elected commissioners held their first meeting, choosing the still-unnamed west bank town to be the county seat. Then they turned to the problem of a name.
They ignored the name that some had already been using: All Saints.
“In the beginning, not to be outdone by St. Paul and St. Anthony, the citizens on the west side of the river called their settlement ‘All Saints,’ and so it was known to travelers,” Ernest Dudley Parsons wrote in his 1913 book, “The Story of Minneapolis.”
“Possibly it seemed to some of the residents that there was too much saintliness,” Parsons wrote. “At any rate discontent arose over this name and various artful schemers aimed to better it.”
County Commissioner Alex Moore suggested at that first meeting to name the place Albion, Stevens wrote. Albion had long been used as a synonym for England or Great Britain (like the “cliffs of Albion” in Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre,” written five years earlier).
Another commissioner suggested the name Lowell, an homage to the Massachusetts city that was famous for harnessing water power to run its textile mills.
The commissioners took a vote and chose Albion, Stevens wrote. They instructed the clerk to include “Albion, Hennepin county, Minnesota” at the top of future county documents.
Residents quickly rejected the decision.
“Considerable feeling was exhibited by the residents of the county and the almost unanimous sentiment was against the name selected by the commissioners,” Stevens wrote. “Meantime all the necessary [stationery] for the use of the county had been obtained with the name of Albion ... printed therein.”
That was in October. By December, the name Albion would be replaced.
Stop the presses
The St. Anthony Express newspaper on Nov. 5 published teacher Charles Hoag’s suggestion for a new name: “Minnehapolis,” a mashup of “mni” (water) and “polis” (city).
“This was the first time that the name of the future city ever appeared in print,” Stevens wrote. “In fact Mr. Hoag had only invented it the previous night while in bed.”
Hoag told his wife at the breakfast table, according to a 1930s Minneapolis Star article. Getting it into the paper that day involved some drama. But Hoag had an important ally: the Express’ editor, George Bowman. He didn’t like the name Albion, either.
Hoag rushed over to St. Anthony in the morning. But the pages of that day’s Express had already been set into type and locked, ready for the printing press. Bowman decided to unlock them and make room for Hoag’s big idea.
“The article was put in type and inserted,” Stevens wrote. “Mr. Hoag had no time to consult any one, except Mr. Bowman, in regard to the name proposed ... but when it did appear most everyone was in favor of it.”
Bowman wrote in a subsequent editorial that the name was “beautiful and exceedingly appropriate,” as opposed to the “meaningless and outlandish name of All Saints.”
Stevens observed that “the editor totally ignored, as most everyone else did, the selection of the name by the county commissioners.”
Whose idea was ‘Minneapolis’?
The next month, it became official. At what Stevens described as “an accidental meeting of most all the citizens” at his house, they ignored commissioners’ last-minute call to consider the name Winona. “It was decided to withdraw the silent h and call the place Minneapolis,” he wrote.
The telling and retelling of Minneapolis getting its name in the subsequent decades led some people to credit Bowman, the newspaper editor, for the idea.
An early Minnesota history book included a letter from one of Bowman’s cousins, which described the editor coming up with the name during a horseback ride from St. Anthony to Marine Mills.
“Nothing in the history of Minneapolis, and indeed few events in the history of the state of Minnesota, have occasioned more argument than this question, ‘Who named Minneapolis?’” the Minneapolis Journal wrote in 1917. “The Hoagites have had the better of it in the main, but the Bowmanites have ever been aggressive.”
The Journal settled the “Hoag-Bowman controversy” by saying that Hoag was “entitled to the honor.”
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