Local lore in Hermantown, Minnesota

• The Hawks have won three state hockey titles, in 2007, 2016, and 2017, and for a stretch in the 2010s Hermantown was the most reliably good small-school hockey program in Minnesota. In this city, "state tournament week" is a scheduling constraint.
• Almost every name here is somebody's surname. Hermantown is named for August Herman, a surveyor, not for where the early homesteaders came from, and the folk etymology reading it as a description of the settlers has been enjoyed locally since 1873 and wrong the entire time. Fichtner, Stebner, Okerstrom, and Ugstad were section-line families before they were roads, and roads before they were parks.
• The city exists because Duluth tried to take it. When Duluth moved in 1974 to annex about two-thirds of the township, residents incorporated instead, and Hermantown became a city on December 31, 1975.
• Hermantown was, for a period, the only city in St. Louis County adding population while the rest of the region shrank, and the subdivisions on Maple Grove Road are the physical record of it. The consequence is that almost nothing here is old: in a metro where a 1925 bungalow is entry-level housing, a city whose median house is younger than its owner is a genuinely unusual product, and it is the whole reason the per-square-foot price is what it is.
• Keene Creek is a trout stream inside a suburb. The 80-plus acre park in the southeast corner protects a working coldwater creek that most residents drive past without knowing it is there.
• The fighter jets are the local clock. Residents on the flight path can tell you the Air National Guard's usual training window without looking at a schedule, and everyone else in the city gets to enjoy the sound from a comfortable distance.

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