Macalester Land Plot History

Macalester Land Plot History

Macalester’s main campus is situated conveniently between downtown St. Paul and Minneapolis, close to MSP International Airport, nested in a residential district with easy access to public transit and local business. This is the story the college tells about its location. Since 2018, Macalester has also often included a land acknowledgement at events and classes:

We ask that you take a moment to honor the fact that we are on Dakota land. Macalester is situated on the ancestral homeland of the Dakota people, particularly the Sisseton and Wahpeton bands, who were forcibly exiled from the land because of aggressive and persistent settler colonialism. We make this acknowledgement to honor the Dakota people, ancestors and descendants, as well as the land itself. ^[1]Barbara Kuzma, “DML Land Acknowledgement created this summer,” The Mac Weekly, October 11, 2018, https://themacweekly.com/75018/uncategorized/dml-land-acknowledgement-created-this-summer/.

But what has Macalester’s specific role been in this history? What is the story of this place, and how did the college come to be on the land it now occupies? Macalester gains material, financial, and political power from its landholdings. In order to truly honor–or even acknowledge–Dakota people and land rights, the college must reckon with its history and the benefits it still reaps from settler colonialism.

The territory Macalester currently occupies is Mni Sota Makoce, Dakota homeland.^[2]See Teresa Peterson and Walter LaBatte Jr., “The Land, Water, and Language of the Dakota, Minnesota’s First People,” MNOPEDIA, Minnesota Historical Society, accessed February 2021, … Continue reading At the center of this territory, and of the Dakota world, is Bdote, the confluence of Wakpa Mnisota (the Minnesota River) and Ḣaḣa Wakpa (the Mississippi River). Macalester’s main campus stands about three miles north of this sacred site.

In 1805 Zebulon Pike, representing Governor of Louisiana Territory General James Wilkinson, led an expedition to explore what was then the northern part of the new Louisiana Territory: Dakota and western Ojibwe homelands, currently known as Minnesota. Pike met with a party of Dakota people at Wita Tanka (currently called Pike Island) at Bdote and arranged the transfer of 100,000 acres of land from the Dakota for the purpose of building a fort.^[3]“Wita Tanka,” Bdote Memory Map, accessed December 2020, http://bdotememorymap.org/memory-map/#. He gave gifts of money and liquor during the negotiations, but these weren’t officially considered payment for the land, and the US federal government didn’t ratify the agreement until 1808.^[4]Martin W. Case, “‘Pike’s Treaty’ – One Bdote area myth,” Bdote Memory Map, March 14, 2010, https://bdote.wordpress.com/2010/03/14/pike-treaty-the-bdote-area-myth/. This series of events is now referred to as the 1805 Treaty of St. Peters, or Pike’s Purchase, and the United States and Minnesota governments have retroactively recognized it as a valid treaty. The portion of land in question is two tracts of nine square miles each, one on each side of Ḣaḣa Wakpa. That land is currently the site of the Twin Cities (see the maps from MNHS and the Library of Congress). (Read more about Pike’s expeditions in a 1934 manuscript by members of the Mac history department, held in the college archives.)

During the time after Pike’s purchase of the tract, the area was considered a military reservation. White settlers squatted on the land from 1821 until 1840, when military officials expelled them. In 1839 Fort Snelling commander Major Joseph Plympton ordered the tract surveyed and its boundaries expanded so that the area east of Ḣaḣa Wakpa stretched north to what is now Marshall Avenue and east toward where St. Paul Cathedral is today. The portion between what are now Marshall and St. Clair Avenues and west of Fairview to Ḣaḣa Wakpa was granted to Irish settler William Finn in 1848 for his service in the Mexican-American War. In 1849, the same year as the establishment of Minnesota Territory, the remainder of the tract was surveyed and divided into full (square-mile) and partial plots. The divisions between these plots established the lines that most major streets in the area, including Snelling, Summit, and St. Clair, now follow. In 1854 the federal government sold the plots at auction. A group of settlers fixed the sale and intimidated other potential buyers so that they could buy the land at the minimum bid of $1.25/acre.^[5]Donald Empson, “Highland-Groveland-Macalester Park: The Old Reserve Township,” Ramsey County History 10, no. 2 (Fall 1973), 13-14. Access this article with a Macalester google account at … Continue reading

The next time the plot of land where Macalester sits came on the official record was in 1871, when Thomas Holyoke bought the plot from Hiram Rogers on May 23.^[6]“Legal Notices,” The Saint Paul Daily Globe (Saint Paul, MN), April 7, 1880, … Continue reading Rogers seems to have purchased the land in 1856, but the boundaries of that purchase were not recorded, so it is possible he acquired this particular plot in another transaction.^[7]“City Items,” The Minnesota Weekly Times (Saint Paul, MN), July 19, 1856, … Continue reading Thomas Holyoke farmed the plot until he passed away some time in 1880.^[8]“The Courts,” The Saint Paul Daily Globe (Saint Paul, MN), November 13, 1880, … Continue reading In January 1882, the executor of Holyoke’s estate conveyed the land to Thomas Cochran, Jr., acting on behalf of the Macalester board of managers, who bought it for $24,000 (or $150/acre) for the purpose of building the college.^[9]“Current Events,” Wabasha County Herald (Wabasha, MN), January 4, 1882, … Continue reading At this time, the plot was bounded by Snelling on the east, Fairview on the west, St. Clair on the south, and Summit on the north. The Macalester trustees gifted forty acres to the college which now make up its main campus.^[10]Donald Empson, “Highland-Groveland-Macalester Park: The Old Reserve Township,” Ramsey County History 10, no. 2 (Fall 1973), 16. Access this article with a Macalester google account at … Continue reading The rest became Macalester Park.

The land that came to be Shaw Field, the Main Lawn, the academic buildings and athletic fields and dormitories that make up Macalester’s physical space, was stolen. It came into the college’s possession through Pike’s deceptive negotiations, the United States federal government’s retroactive decision to call those negotiations a treaty, and the efforts of some white settlers to strong-arm their own government into selling the land at the minimum price. Macalester has a campus only because these events occurred, and in that way–among many others–it has benefitted directly from the processes of settler colonialism. Yet Macalester is not just a passive recipient in these processes. Its founding was part of a larger effort to bring white, Christian education to the West in order to replace Indigenous lifeways and make way for settler society.

In the years since Macalester’s establishment, the college has continued to exert direct and indirect influence over the land and people surrounding it. One of the most impactful programs in this area has been the High Winds Fund, founded in 1956 with money from major Macalester donor DeWitt Wallace in order to “maintain and improve the beauty, serenity, and security of the area surrounding the campus of Macalester College.”^[11]“The High Winds Fund,” Macalester College, accessed February 2021, https://www.macalester.edu/highwinds/. Wallace was a conservative and a public Nazi sympathizer, and his financial contributions to Macalester often steered the college in the direction of keeping its student body and surrounding neighborhood mostly white.^[12]Margaret Moran and Hannah Catlin, “The men Macalester immortalized,” The Mac Weekly, October 31, 2019, https://themacweekly.com/76894/neill-hall/the-men-macalester-immortalized/. Over the last nearly seventy years, the High Winds Fund has shaped the demographics and physical character of the neighborhood surrounding Macalester. For more information about this aspect of the college’s history, check out the High Winds Fund tag.

While Macalester’s main campus makes up forty acres, the college also holds almost 300 acres of land as the Katharine Ordway Natural History Study Area (Ordway Field Station). Ordway is about 17 miles (by road, or 11 miles straight) southeast of the main campus, just west of River Lake off of Ḣaḣa Wakpa. The site serves Macalester as a center for the hands-on study of biology, environmental studies, outdoor education, and more.^[13]“Katharine Ordway Natural History Study Area,” Macalester College, accessed February 2021, https://www.macalester.edu/ordway/. It is also the site of four archaeological digs containing material culture from previous Dakota inhabitants. In 2018, Macalester student Abby Thomsen ’20 began a project to use these digs as a point of connection with contemporary Dakota communities. Thomsen’s collaboration with Dakota descendants to produce new interpretive signs for the Ordway sites is the subject of her 2020 honors project in anthropology, which is available here.

Macalester’s influence on the land it occupies is ongoing. It has economic, racial, and ecological dimensions. And it has potential: it can contribute to gentrification, as the High Winds Fund often has, and it can also contribute to building meaningful relationships with the people and communities it has harmed and excluded in the past, as Thomsen did in her project. To honor the Dakota people and the land it occupies, Macalester needs more than a land acknowledgement. Engaging with Macalester’s full history and its current place in the surrounding community is an essential starting point for students, faculty, staff, and administrators who want to push the college to do better.

Metadata
Title: Macalester Land Plot History
Creator: Chamness, Daria
Description: This post gives a brief overview of the history of the land on which Macalester's campus stands. It discusses when and how Macalester College came to be considered the owner of this land and how that process reflects Mac's place in discussions of settler colonialism.
Date Created:
Dates of Content: 1805-2020
Type of Content: Text
Source: N/A
URL: https://dwlibrary.macalester.edu/counterbalance/student-projects/macalester-land-plot-history/

Suggested Citation: Chamness, Daria. "Macalester Land Plot History." Counterbalance, Macalester College Archives. . Text. https://dwlibrary.macalester.edu/counterbalance/student-projects/macalester-land-plot-history/.