The history of Smithville, Duluth, Minnesota

Smithville's history has two threads: a small river-corridor settlement, and an institution that was much more important than the settlement around it.

The residential thread is the far west end's: housing built from roughly 1900 onward along the Grand Avenue corridor for people working in the river valley's industry, the rail and, later, the mill at Morgan Park just east. Stewart Creek and the hillside shaped where it could go, and it never grew large.

The institutional thread is more remarkable. Work People's College operated here from 1907 to 1941. It was a residential school in a building that had originally been a seminary, and for most of its existence it functioned as a radical labor college, politically close to the Industrial Workers of the World, the syndicalist union usually known as the Wobblies. It taught economics, labor organising, language and general education to working adults, and it occupied a specific and well-documented place in American labor history.

That such an institution ran for thirty-four years in a small neighborhood at the far western edge of Duluth, and that the main building was later simply converted into apartments, tells you something about how the industrial era's institutions were absorbed and forgotten.

The rest is the arc the whole river corridor shares. The Duluth Works at Morgan Park and the wider industrial base sustained these neighborhoods for decades, wound down through the second half of the twentieth century, and left small, quiet residential pockets a long way from the rest of the city.

The river's own recovery is the recent chapter. The St. Louis River estuary was heavily worked and heavily polluted through the industrial period and has been the subject of decades of restoration effort, much of it coordinated through the St. Louis River Alliance. Stewart Creek drains into a considerably healthier system than it did a generation ago.

History next door

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