The history of Cloquet, Minnesota

Cloquet began as Knife Falls, a lumber settlement at a drop in the St. Louis River where the water could turn a mill. The river gave the town its industry and its geography: white pine came down from the north, the falls powered the saws, and by the late nineteenth century the settlement had become one of the major lumber-milling centers of the upper Midwest, renamed Cloquet and building sawmills, boarding houses, and a downtown on the north bank.

Then, on October 12, 1918, it burned. A drought had run through the summer, and a series of fires, several of them sparked along rail lines, merged under high winds into a firestorm that swept across Carlton and southern St. Louis counties. Cloquet was destroyed nearly in its entirety. Hundreds of people died across the region, and thousands were left without homes in a single afternoon and night. It remains one of the deadliest natural disasters in Minnesota history, and in this county it is not an abstraction: the fire is still the reference point against which everything else is measured.

The rebuilding is what shaped the city that exists now. Cloquet came back through the 1920s with a new downtown, new housing, and the same industrial base, and the paper industry took over from the sawmills as the pine ran out. The Northwest Paper Company built the mill on the river that later became Potlatch and is now Sappi, and the city's fortunes have tracked the mill's ever since.

Two later chapters are worth knowing. In 1958 Frank Lloyd Wright designed a filling station for R.W. Lindholm on a Cloquet corner. It is the only gas station Wright ever built, it is on the National Register of Historic Places, and it still sells gas, which makes it the most unlikely piece of significant architecture in northeastern Minnesota.

And the Fond du Lac Band, whose reservation was established in the nineteenth century immediately west of the city, has over recent decades built a substantial institutional presence: a tribal college in partnership with the state, its own school, health and natural resources departments, and enterprises including Black Bear Casino Resort. Cloquet's story does not make sense without the Band's, and the two communities' economies are closely intertwined.

History next door

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