one hundred and fifty years ago what would one day become maplewood was bordered by prairie's to the southwest and poorest to the east native americans remained its earliest residence in till the eight hundred forty s when settlers began the long hundred forty four near the lake that bears his name today he was followed by so many other french canadians that in eight hundred fifty eight when minnesota became a state and townships were being organized the area north of st paul including present day mabel would was given the name new canada township in the eighteen fifties land sold for two dollars an acre and gradually people started building farms along county road  called maple street back then and near an old indian trail which is now called he's a what street by eight hundred eighty settlers had staked out claims on every piece of fertile new canada farmland one of them was sarah wakefield who would eventually have a lake and a park named after her with st paul floor she trails turned into roads truck farm and became an important source of income for these early residents and would continue well into the next century new canada farmer supplied st paul's urban dwellers with fresh fruits and vegetables sold either through grocers or at the st paul farmers market one early farmer was peter  moved his family to the area in the late eight hundred eighty s my father had worked for a salary farmer in the mississippi street area and had gotten married and was looking for a place where there were a lot of bog was conducive to raising a good salary and that's why he chose a seven acre plot on what is now highway sixty one just south of county road see this side celery cook raised corn cabbage beans squash and a variety of other vegetables that he sold at the city market oh all farm life was hard life it wasn't easy they in order to go to the market they had to go by way of course on the way and that meant getting up but three o'clock in the morning so as to feed the horses and they'd have a bite to eat because they had to be at the market by six o'clock when market opened and they had approximately seven miles to go to the market so that wasn't easy it's not like an hour and ten minutes well my father started in whatever your dad was eight hundred eighty seven eight hundred eighty eight and he went to the market until he purchased his first truck a wilcox truck and bad as i remember was about nineteen camera eleven something like that i don't know exactly and then my father didn't go to the market anymore but his eldest son jake up did dairy farming was also a significant industry in the area the schroeder mill company started in eighty four is one of the only farming operations from that period still in existence today this period also saw the formation of what would eventually have the greatest impact on maplewood future development its unusual shape in eight hundred eighty seven st paul and explained from new canada's neighbor mclean township this left a mile wide strip that was incorporated into new canada township it would come to be known as maple woods southern leg at the same time residents in the north east corner of new canada township withdrew to organize the village of north st paul the remaining land oddly shaped though it was but ultimately become modern day maplewood but before that could happen dusty weygand wheels had to make way for noisy steam engines the railroad was coming through at the intersection where these two lines met a tiny new manufacturing town was born and it was given the name glad the person is credited with naming the town are william dawson and his wife mary who owned a large chunk of land there at the junction they named the new town gladstone after the british statesman william gladstone gladstone was a fairly popular name for towns back then and several already existed around the country the dawsons planted the area and filed its name on august twenty seventh eight hundred eighty six it was their hope that gladstone minnesota would become a town to rival st paul and it seemed like that dream might soon be realized when the st paul in duluth where old built a depot there the gladstone station things must have looked even brighter the following year when the railroad built gladstone first major industry the gladstone shops the st pauli duluth rerolled built its repair and manufacturing shops in gladstone in eight hundred eighty seven on the southwest corner of frost avenue in english street well it was a typical railroad shop for the whole road that man shop the same paul and ruth was not a long railroad by most standards from st paul did a lot of but they repaired a local mottos they repaired the cars they built the passion your cars and freight cars and all steam locomotives had heavy maintenance and it also was the sight of the round house the calling power of the water for the there were nine repair tracks along with the rails that ran to the round house and machine shop go back to the shop shop and other repair shops the round house was large enough to hold twenty five locomotive and ten the railroad renamed the gladstone depot gloucester to avoid continuous cargo mix ups with gladstone michigan area residents ignored the name change and continue to call it gladstone the northern pacific railroad already had its own repair and manufacturing shops so the once booming gladstone shops spent the next seventy five years slowly decaying as rental property until hundred seventy nine when all the buildings were demolished in one thousand nine hundred four the city of maplewood bought twenty four acres of land formerly occupied by the old gladstone shops to be preserved as open s the president of the prior words was none other than gladstone's founder william dawson he was also the president of the big of minnesota which failed in eight hundred ninety six when dawson grew short of funds the plant was idled the building was reopened in one thousand nine hundred three under the name poirier manufacturing company which made its own brand of grain drills the company sold two thousand master of all shoe drills in its first year of operation that company went hundred eight and by one nine hundred twenty one the buildings were completely uninhabited the old plough works land was used as a town dump for many years until eventually like the proverbial phoenix a neighborhood residents raised their own food and ran a large dairy operation the poor farm enjoyed a moment in the limelight when ripley's believe it or not published the fact that to reach the ramsey county poor farm you had to travel down prosperity ro hundred fifty s the farming activity had stopped and the building was renamed the ramsey county nursing home the land around the home became a hub for sports and entertainment where many other counties in the state have demolished their poor farms to bury the past in the one nine hundred eighty s the ramsey county nursing home underwent a major restoration the reward bricks remain a silent tribute to the area's rich history and is the only building in neighborhood to be listed on the national register of historic places things were looking good for gladstone in the late eighty's with the plow works and rare old shops located there people started to take notice the february eighteen eighty eight issue of northwest magazine stated there is hardly any more promising town or suburb in the north west than gladstone its location so near the heart of the city and directly in line of the latter's most rapid advancement it seems hardly possible that a great industrial center will not develop here indeed the new factories attracted about five hundred workers and their families with them came grocery stores saloons and eventually schools the particular school that i went to district floor so we can have a band in eighteen eighty seven the four room gladstone school was built at a cost of eleven thousand dollars it would become the center of activity for the community for the next sixty years many a dance and meeting were held within its walls and most of the churches and gladstone had their beginnings there as well road improvements also turn like jarvis and white bear lake into popular resort destinations people trying to escape the hustle and bustle of the city side lads don't is a kind of victorian fly over land and they kept cottages around area lakes in the eighteen eighties and served up fresh fish caught in lake jarvis and fresh vegetables from his garden in the tape day i understand that it really had a following that well to do people from as far away as the other side of minneapolis would come and they would come by horse and buggy because there was no train that was close there the coleman hotel's guest book shows that a room cost two and a quarter and along with mentioning the number of fish caught numerous men checked in with female cons sorts making the hotel some in spite of the area's popularity to vacationers by the early one nine hundred lads doan's once thriving factories had grown silent with its largest industries gone and many of the town's inhabitants left to find new jobs gla e shining moment as a manufacturing powerhouse had come and go hundred twenty s the increasing popularity of the automobile set the course for the town's future housing developers began to buy up land around gladstone and newly paved roads brought in harry de st paul commuters searching for larger lots and cleaner air oh the area had changed a great deal everybody had a car or some people had two of them like we had two cars or we were  my husband and i am i father didn't have any and we were going into the city for all sorts of things and it was not a dollar like it had been when we were growing up gladston became what you would call a bedroom community and we had pretty good service you could take the train to work people that had automobiles and believe it or not some of them walked to fail and parked in cop the street car and then later they have bus service and commuter type bus service the one nine hundred forty s brought a steady stream of people into gladstone an surrounding areas however life in these early suburbs was anything but carefree you know at that time we were the the poor brother when you lived out in the rural areas it was because you basically couldn't afford to live a town where the young man i would involved but i can remember my father and others you know pleading with the city of st paul to provide these services and they more or less said you would out there use shift for yourself and i think that was kind of the the original inner cities attitudes toward the suburbs well i had the joy of learning an awful lot growing up in the small limited acre farm we have got team of horses and we had a cow we had chickens and we had pigs and so all of us children there were six of us daughters in our family and we've heard from the ground up how to care for them how to feed the chickens how do gather the eggs and one incident i have to tell you that every friday our grocery man came and it was made up of farmers european farmers that came into the year heavily truck garden farms and small dairy farms and and just about anybody who lived you know how such as we did would have probably an acre of land or at least a half acre and and everybody had gardens and we had one call people would have chickens i mean it was kind of farmers in a way but a much smaller scale of the people who were making a living at it i mean these farms have been in the family for two three generations and those farmers worked off of the land and it worked off the assets that they created and they didn't have retirement fund they weren't planning on it so what has it was going on is they're using the development pressure as a retirement fund for the family so in this case here the family lived there for generations sold off the fire that family members were able to to retire and what was a farm is basically forgotten left out in the country that just the front of the arid timeline here were all flowers because this was where people would come to get away from the city it was very very different across the street with nothing it was a swamp and so i had seen a lot of changes through the  after world war two my folks came here my grandparents rather and they came here and a lot of people would come out here and this was a lot more rural maplewood and not as developed as it is now and we didn't have the maple all of course and all these different things three am and different but people of families would come here and stay in those cabins for extended period of time so i'm clearly it's time that you know for something new here and you know a summary knowing of the space the old signs can be taken down today and i'm really excited to see that the minnesota's historical site is going to take possession of the sign and it's they're going to refurbish it and bring it down to their facility in st paul we're really excited about  a number of different topics course minnesota is well known as a tourist destination known for its tourist economy and the sign is a perfect example of that post war tourist con and he also it represents something of a forgotten step in the evolution of the hotel industry where motorists could get off and go right to the cabin there and have their own small areas they stayed in their travels and course their tourist cabins were only around for a couple of decades before they were replaced by the later larger hotel chains and see today the motel wonder community landmark been standing here for so many years we estimated to have been up since about nine hundred forty five so it's really quite incredible but still standing it's a fantastic piece in wonderful shape and follow i would always go to the the tournaments to st paul at one time they had bought them on the open say paul open and then they had a women's tournament for a number of years and i approve all followed those big name golfers of the time would pretty much all be there friend's wife was called terry and when i got a letter the first letter from him from fort benning georgia he wrote dear terry and i called my mother i said he must be sick because i have never heard him called me terry  so i built my house in one nine hundred forty six on a g i four percent of my payments were principal interest taxes were thirty six something a month thirty six dollars some sensible but that was a quarter of my salary husband and i my father didn't have any and we were going into the city for all sorts of things and right after the war of course it was very difficult to get one and i remember along towards waker it was pretty open yet so might be having a with actually just to two lanes back down through the years it is gone to a four lane and paved a couple times widened a couple times since i've been in the rulers at least at that point in time the taxes were very minimal of course we didn't have very services either we had our own wells with our own sewage systems so forth it was well we were township at the time and in the mean time it was town in canada they had not had a had asked city hall or place to go for people to go get permits so they went to the building inspectors house department building that they put in office and then i started working just three hours a day didn't last very long because we were doing a lot of permit them so when i started basically my job was to do the permits fill them out and oscar would come in and look them over and sign them and tell me how much to charge for the permits and then  was probably there two years and then they built on to the fire station and we had tools to work and they were much warmer because we weren't opening the door for the fire trucks and stuff all the time so that was a very interesting time i was the only one in the office for quite some time and then we started doing voter registration then they we had to hire more people to do that my grandmother was ida and her maiden name was waiter and they were actually the riginal for forty acres was a wedding present to my grandfather grandmother from her folks and that's how the firm got started and then through the years it was built up two hundred seventy five acres which was some wood my father started selling some of the property i believe the earliest was late fifty's maybe early sixty's and it was just a little chopped up along the beach it was already in because they were putting water and the property at three am with that i wrote up the first building permit for three am and i ask ok you know he had to sign it and figure out that the fee and that mile wide strap to keep three m they want oh exactly ira people on the council at that time put a lot of money and  lot of time and effort into keeping that step of property are us and i think they did a little back and forth stuff to keep to keep that the league was pretty much all developed in those days there wasn't too much down there till three m showed up very big developing that that changed the course of history all the way with regard to maplewood well when three i moved in of course it became a real tax slum where everybody was aware of that and of course the city of st paul the better fire departments that you could get sore in the water they'd come with your city type of a government or village rather than the concept it was the talk of the town there were a lot of people all upset over it it was in all the papers oh war between the city in the suburbs can accomplish nothing both would suffer cooperation between them is the answer  ramsey county review january thirty first one thousand nine hundred fifty seven the mayor of st paul at that time was joe dillon he invited the new candidate township board down to the st paul athletic club election set up and so he was going to go with me that first when we had the incorporation election so  well we had we had eight precincts by that time so that meant we waited there for election judge just i heard all the election just about and we had to wait for them to get their gave the official total and yes we had a referendum people voted to recall their old village which of course protected the property which now is st paul didn't get what they wanted and we