Stillwater & the St. Croix Valley: Antiques, Potholes & a River Bluff

Minnesota's oldest city was platted in 1843 on the west bank of the St. Croix River — the first Minnesota Territorial Legislature met here in 1848, predating statehood by a decade, and the town's role as the administrative center of the new territory made it briefly the most important settlement in what would become Minnesota. The logging era of the 1880s made Stillwater one of the wealthiest cities in the Upper Midwest as white pine logs were floated down the St. Croix from the vast northern forests to Stillwater's 14 sawmills; the city was processing hundreds of millions of board feet per year at its peak, and the fortunes generated by that industry built the ornate brick storefronts and limestone commercial buildings that line Main Street today, now home to over 80 antique dealers — the highest concentration of antique shops in the Midwest. The economic stillness that followed the exhaustion of the great pine forests around 1900 paradoxically preserved Stillwater's Victorian streetscape in amber, and the town entered the 21st century with a built environment more intact than virtually any comparable logging boomtown in the region. Look for the 1843 Territorial Prison site marker on the bluff above downtown, a reminder of the rough frontier justice that preceded the lumber barons' gilded age.

Built in 1927 by Arthur Palmer on the site of an earlier hostelry, the Lowell Inn's George Washington Room features hand-painted murals of colonial Virginia scenes, white-columned architecture, and table service with silver and crystal that was extraordinary for a Minnesota river town in the Depression years. The inn has hosted every Minnesota governor and numerous US presidents over its nearly century-long run, and its formal dining room remains one of the most deliberately old-fashioned in the state — a place where the rituals of a mid-century fine lunch are still observed with the seriousness they were designed for. The signature dishes — chicken almondine and walleye almondine — have been on the menu for decades, and the inn's commitment to regional fish preparations speaks to a Minnesota dining tradition that stretches back to the earliest river town supper clubs.

Lift Bridge opened in 2008 in Stillwater's historic warehouse district, taking its name from the 1931 vertical lift bridge that for decades was the only vehicular crossing of the St. Croix River between Minnesota and Wisconsin for miles in either direction — a massive steel structure whose raising and lowering for river traffic was a daily spectacle for the town and a reminder of how completely the river once governed the rhythms of life on its banks. The Farm Girl Saison and Crosscut Pale Ale are the year-round standards, with seasonal releases that often reference North Shore and river valley ingredients. The taproom patio looks out over the hillside above the St. Croix floodplain, and on summer evenings the light across the Wisconsin bluffs turns the color of the amber banded agates that wash out of the glacial till along the river's gravel bars.

Perched on the limestone bluff 200 feet above downtown Stillwater, Pioneer Park offers the most commanding view of the St. Croix River valley available without hiking — a panorama that takes in the full breadth of the river, the forested Wisconsin bluffs on the opposite shore, and the historic lower town spread along the riverbank below. From this vantage point the historic Stillwater Lift Bridge and the newer St. Croix Crossing cable-stay bridge can be seen simultaneously — old river crossing and new, a compression of 90 years of infrastructure history in a single sightline. The park was established in the 1890s when Stillwater's logging prosperity was at its peak, and the limestone ledge it sits on is the same geological formation that made the town's position strategically irreplaceable: hard enough to anchor the mills and warehouses that lined the shore, high enough to overlook the river for miles in either direction.

Built in 1855 by lumberman and politician William Henry Carman Folsom, the Folsom House is one of the oldest intact homes in Minnesota and is preserved by the Minnesota Historical Society exactly as it was furnished in the 1880s — a time capsule of frontier prosperity that escaped the clearances and upgrades that destroyed most comparable structures. Folsom was a member of the first Minnesota Territorial Legislature in 1849 and served in both the territorial and state legislatures over a long career, and the house reflects the aspirations of the logging elite: Greek Revival architecture — the style of choice for ambitious Americans seeking to project permanence — transported to the Minnesota frontier at considerable expense in an era when even rough lumber was scarce. The adjacent Marine General Store, established in 1839 as a trading post serving the nascent logging operations, claims to be the oldest continuously operating general store in Minnesota, a distinction that places this tiny river village at the very origin point of the state's commercial history.

Interstate State Park on the St. Croix River at Taylors Falls preserves the most dramatic evidence of glacial meltwater geology in the Upper Midwest — and arguably in North America. Ten thousand years ago, at the end of the last ice age, the ancestral glacial St. Croix River carried tremendous volumes of meltwater and sediment-laden currents through this canyon, and the turbulence created by the basalt walls generated drilling vortices that bored cylindrical potholes straight down into the bedrock with a precision that no human tool of the era could match. The deepest pothole measured at Interstate is 60 feet deep and 12 feet wide — among the deepest potholes ever recorded anywhere on earth. The Dalles of the St. Croix, the basalt canyon that frames the river at this point, was formed not by water but by ancient lava flows approximately 1.1 billion years ago during the Midcontinent Rift — the same geological event responsible for the copper country of Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula — and the columnar basalt walls that rise 70 feet above the water on both sides represent the frozen surface of that ancient flood of magma.

107 acres of open meadow and river bottomland forest just south of Taylors Falls along the St. Croix host over 100 large-scale sculpture installations by emerging and mid-career artists, making Franconia one of the largest free outdoor sculpture parks in North America. Admission is always free. The park operates an artist residency program through which new works are fabricated on-site by visiting sculptors, meaning the collection rotates substantially year to year as new pieces arrive and older ones depart or are acquired by other institutions. The works range from welded-steel abstractions as large as a house to carved wood forms, kinetic installations that respond to wind, and earthworks that require the meadow itself as their medium. The setting — flat river bottomland framed by wooded bluffs — gives each piece a dramatic natural backdrop that indoor galleries cannot approximate, and the combination of glacial landscape and contemporary art makes Franconia one of the more genuinely surprising cultural destinations in Minnesota.

Use the afternoon to explore a different side of W.H.C. Folsom House — there's more to discover beyond the morning highlights.

A 1950s-style malt shop and supper club on the Taylors Falls main street serving walleye dinners, pasties, and hand-dipped ice cream — exactly the kind of regional supper club that is disappearing from small-town Minnesota but thrives here in a river town where the tourist season sustains the kitchen through the summer months and the regulars carry it through the long winters. The wild rice soup is made from scratch with hand-harvested rice from the lake country to the north, a preparation that connects this dining room to the Ojibwe wild-rice tradition that long predates any European settlement along the St. Croix. The combination of a supper club dinner and a malt-shop dessert in the same room and the same evening is a distinctly Minnesota experience that the cities have largely rationalized away.