How Minneapolis Residents Rejected the City’s Original Name: Albion

Curious Minnesota

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Naming a city is a tricky business.

Duluth took its name from a French explorer. St. Paul paid homage to an apostle. Minneapolis took a different route, merging the Dakota and Greek words for water and city into an entirely new name.

But that only happened after the city’s residents firmly rejected the original name Albion.

Reader Mike Sherer learned about Albion’s name change from an earlier Curious Minnesota article about the John H. Stevens House — where the decision came from. Surprised to learn the town had ever had a different name, he asked Curious Minnesota, the Star Tribune’s reader-generated reporting project, for the full story.

“I’ve long been curious about how places get their names and how those names get changed,” said Sherer, who lived in the Twin Cities for nearly two decades and now lives in Iowa.

Before Minneapolis got its current name, settlers in the small town couldn’t agree on what to call the place. Opposing opinions were so persistent that people had decided to “disagree on any name,” according to a memoir by Stevens, who built the settlement’s first wood-frame house.

The Founding of Albion, Minnesota

Stevens built his home in 1850 on what was then part of Fort Snelling Military Reservation, across the Mississippi River from the emerging town of St. Anthony. The house became a popular gathering place for residents of the settlement that grew up around it.

It’s where the first election in Hennepin County was held in 1852, and it’s where the county’s newly elected commissioners held their first meeting, choosing the still-unnamed West Bank town as the county seat. Then they turned to the problem of a name.

They ignored the name that some were already using: All Saints.

“At first the citizens on the west side of the river called their settlement ‘All Saints’, not to be outdone by St. Paul and St. Anthony. Travelers knew it by this name,” wrote Ernest Dudley Parsons in his 1913 book, “The Story of Minneapolis.”

“Perhaps it seemed to some of the inhabitants that there was too much sanctity,” wrote Parsons. “At any rate, dissatisfaction arose with this name, and various wily schemers attempted to improve it.”

County Commissioner Alex Moore suggested at that first meeting that the place be named Albion, Stevens wrote. Albion had long been used as a synonym for England or Great Britain (as had the “cliffs of Albion” in Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre,” written five years earlier).

Another commissioner suggested the name Lowell, in tribute to the Massachusetts city famous for its use of water power to power its textile mills.

The commissioners took a vote and chose Albion, Stevens wrote. They instructed the clerk to put “Albion, Hennepin County, Minnesota” at the top of future county documents.

The residents quickly rejected the decision.

“Much feeling was manifested by the people of the county and the almost unanimous sentiment was against the name chosen by the commissioners,” Stevens wrote. “Meanwhile all the necessary (stationery) for the use of the county had been obtained with the name Albion … printed upon it.”

That was in October. In December the name Albion would be replaced.

Stop the presses

The St. Anthony Express newspaper on November 5 published a suggestion by teacher Charles Hoag for a new name: “Minnehapolis,” a contraction of “mni” (water) and “polis” (city).

“This was the first time the name of the future city ever appeared in print,” Stevens wrote. “In fact, Mr. Hoag had only thought of it the previous night as he lay in bed.”

Hoag told his wife at the breakfast table, according to a 1930s Minneapolis Star article. Getting into the paper that day brought some drama. But Hoag had a key ally: Express editor George Bowman. He didn’t like the Albion name either.

Hoag rushed to St. Anthony in the morning. But the pages of that day’s Express were already set in type and locked, ready for the printing press. Bowman decided to unlock them and make room for Hoag’s big idea.

“The article was typed and inserted,” Stevens wrote. “Mr. Hoag had no time to consult any one, except Mr. Bowman, with regard to the proposed name … but when it appeared nearly everyone was in favor of it.”

Bowman wrote in a later editorial that the name was “beautiful and eminently appropriate”, in contrast to the “meaningless and bizarre name All Saints”.

Stevens noted that “the editor, like most others, completely ignored the county commissioners’ choice of name.”

Whose idea was ‘Minneapolis’?

The following month, it became official. At what Stevens described as “a casual meeting of nearly all the citizens” at his home, they ignored the commissioners’ last-minute appeal to consider the name Winona. “It was decided to drop the silent h and call the place Minneapolis,” he wrote.

The retelling of the name Minneapolis over the next few decades led some people to credit Bowman, the newspaper’s editor, with originating the idea.

One of the earliest history books on Minnesota contained a letter from one of Bowman’s nephews describing how the editor came up with the name while riding a horse from St. Anthony to Marine Mills.

“Nothing in the history of Minneapolis, and indeed few events in the history of the state of Minnesota, have excited more discussion than this question, ‘Who gave Minneapolis its name?'” wrote the Minneapolis Journal in 1917. “The Hoagites have generally fared better, but the Bowmanites have always been aggressive.”

The magazine ended the “Hoag-Bowman controversy” by stating that Hoag was “deserving of the credit.”

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