The history of Hermantown, Minnesota

Hermantown was farm and forest before it was anything else. A pair of families moving from upstate New York filed homesteads here in 1867, the Kohlts and Acker families arrived in 1871, and by 1873 the settlement was organized as the Town of Herman, named for surveyor August Herman. The name has been misread locally for a century and a half as a description of where the early homesteaders came from rather than as one man's surname. It was not, but the misreading is now part of the place. By the turn of the century the Town of Herman had about 625 residents.

For most of the next century it stayed rural: dairy and hay farms, cutover timber land, gravel pits, and scattered homesteads on the section-line roads that still carry family names. Ugstad, Stebner, Fichtner, and Okerstrom are all road names before they are park names, which is a fair summary of how the place was organized.

Two twentieth-century developments turned the township into a suburb. The first was the airport. Duluth's municipal field expanded northwest of the city and became Duluth International, bringing a fighter-interceptor mission and, later, the Air National Guard wing that still flies from it. That put paved highway access, jobs, and infrastructure on Hermantown's doorstep. The second was Miller Hill. As Duluth's retail migrated up out of downtown to the top of the hill through the 1970s, the corridor immediately adjacent to Hermantown became the metro's commercial center, and living just past it became convenient rather than remote.

The incorporation itself was defensive. In 1974 Duluth moved to annex roughly two-thirds of the township, and residents responded by rallying to incorporate, becoming the City of Hermantown on December 31, 1975. Everything that makes the place attractive to buyers now, its own city government, its own levy, its own ISD 700 schools, exists because the township refused to be absorbed.

It then spent the following decades doing what few places in northeastern Minnesota have done: growing. Census figures show a roughly 6.4% population increase between 2019 and 2024 (US Census Bureau, accessed 2026-08-13), in a region where most communities have been flat or declining for fifty years. For a stretch it was the only city in St. Louis County adding people.

The identity that grew alongside it is a hockey identity. The Hermantown Hawks have won the Minnesota state boys hockey tournament three times, in 2007, 2016, and 2017, and the program's run through a long string of state tournament appearances gave a suburb with no downtown a genuine civic story. Ask anyone in the metro what they know about Hermantown and this is what they will say.

History next door

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