St. Mary’s Point
This small city, across the mouth of Bolles Creek from Afton, is a quiet, residential area with a population of about 350. Its history is associated with some of Minnesota’s earliest pioneers.
The first record we have of a land transaction on the point dates back to 1844, when the area was still part of St. Croix County, Wisconsin Territory. That March, Gaspare Bruce sold his claim on the point to Henry Sibley, agent for the American Fur Company at Mendota. Bruce was an old voyageur, an employee of Sibley’s who had retired to the Afton area. French-Canadian families had been living in the area from as early as 1837. In July 1844 Sibley sold the claim to Joseph R. Brown, founder of Dacotah (now Stillwater). The price for the 160 acres of land lying between the lake and the north side of Bolles Creek was 100 bushels of oats and 25 barrels of potatoes, any deficit in oats to be payable in turnips at 75 cents the barrel or potatoes at $1 the barrel. These transactions are recorded in Sibley’s books.
Carlis Were Early Farmers
Brown apparently bought the land so his half-sister Lydia Ann and her husband Paul Carli, who had been the first settlers in the Stillwater area, could open a farm. Brown hired Jake Fisher and Joseph Hall to build a two-story frame house on the point, which they had ready for the Carlis to move into by November. Although older settlers referred to this place as Brown’s Farm, Brown never ran it. It was operated by Paul Carli until his death in 1846.
Lydia Carli was made a widow that March when Paul drowned near Catfish Bar (Afton) leaving her with five youngsters and the farm to care for. Paul had been hauling wheat from Grey Cloud Island to the St. Croix valley for milling, and while passing near the lake had stopped to shoot a duck, which fell in to the water. He got out a small canoe and retrieved the duck, but waves overturned his canoe. Because he was weighted down with a heavy coat he was unable to swim to shore and so drowned in sight of one of his sons. When Lydia Carli moved back to Stillwater that fall, J. R. Brown sold the western part of the farm to Lemuel Bolles. A New Yorker, Bolles built the first flouring mill in the valley on the creek that bears his name over the winter of 1845-46. Early settlers also thought Brown owned land north of the creek as late as 1849. In August of 1848, when land sales in the valley began, speculators began to buy.
Prospective Industrial Townsite
According to W. H. C. Folsom, James A. Carr surveyed the point in 1855 and Thomas W. Coleman platted St. Mary Village there. This speculation must have been short-lived. In 1857 the village of St. Mary was again laid out by St. Paul investors Alexander Cathcart and William R. Marshall on land owned by Thomas Coleman and John Cathcart, as a prospective industrial tow. These men were drawn to the area by the early success of sawmills in Lakeland and Afton.
Alexander Cathcart was a Canadian who came to St. Paul in 1851 and owned one of the first brick buildings in St. Paul where he and his brother kept a mercantile business. William R. Marshall, his brother-in-law, had also come to St. Paul in 1851 where he was a merchant and newspaper proprietor. Marshall was elected Minnesota governor in 1866 and served two 2-year terms. After his time in office, Marshall returned to the St. Croix Valley and built a home on Stagecoach Trail.
In St. Mary several lots were sold and houses built. The ambitious plat of about 100 blocks provided a steamboat landing along the entire river frontage. Unfortunately, the village did not benefit from the lumbering industry that developed much of the St. Croix Valley between 1840 and 1914. The sawmill, erected in St. Mary Village in 1857 by investors from Pennsylvania, apparently burned the following year. An 1881 history of Washington County states that, “What then bid fair to be a village of some size, has vanished in smoke, leaving only a few blackened ruins to mark the spot.”
In 1881 a portion of the near ghost town was crossed by the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad, which crossed the Mississippi on a new bridge at Hastings and followed the valley north to Stillwater.
Boom in Summer Cottages
Around 1900, investors from St. Paul and elsewhere, anticipating the St. Croix recreation boom, found the land at what was now called St. Mary’s Point well suited for potential development. People were concerned with the heat and disease rampant in cities, and those who could fled to open land in the country during the summers. In 1910 railroad and lumber baron John Humbird bought 40 acres along the river in St. Mary from Walter Hill, son of “Empire Builder” James J. Hill, on which he built four summer homes for his four daughters and their families. In 1915 George Slater built a home and twelve cottages on the river bank. The cottages, which were constructed of concrete blocks made with sand from the river, were rented out with their own rowboats to city folks during the summers.
The Village of St. Mary’s Point, encompassing 246 acres, was incorporated in 1951, and achieved City status in 1976. City Hall was constructed in 1958. St. Mary’s Point is today a peaceful residential neighborhood of about 135 homes, and quarter of which are along the river, and no commercial development.