The history of Midway Township, Minnesota

Midway Township's history is the history of what happened around it. This corner of St. Louis County was logged, then partly farmed, then gradually settled as rural residential land as Duluth and Proctor grew and cars made a ten-mile commute ordinary.

Proctor, ten minutes east, is the reason the area has the shape it does. It grew as a railroad town serving the ore traffic running down to the Duluth docks, and the rail yards remain its defining feature. The township supplied land, timber and, later, houses for people working in Proctor, Duluth and the industries along the St. Louis River.

The median structure here was built around 1973, which is the clearest single piece of evidence about how the township developed. This is not a historic settlement with a village core; it is postwar and later rural building on parcels split off from larger holdings, filled in steadily over decades rather than platted at once. There is no downtown because there was never a moment when one would have been built.

Jay Cooke State Park to the south and the state forest land to the west have kept the township's edges rural in a way that zoning alone would not have. Land that might otherwise have been developed is public, and it is why a township this close to a city of 86,000 still reads as country.

The land here was Ojibwe country, ceded under treaty in the mid-nineteenth century before the county was surveyed into townships.

History next door

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