Cara Letofsky wrote, "And I don't know a thing about what Seward is
named after, but assume that it's named after the guy who encouraged the
U.S. to buy Alaska in the mid-1800s...." I have always assumed the same
thing. William H. Seward served as secretary of state under Presidents
Lincoln and A. Johnson, and was most famous for the 1867 treaty that bought
Alaska from Russia for a few cents per acre. Alaska was known as "Seward's
Folly." And the Seward neighborhood is near an area where many Russian
immigrants lived in the first half of the twentieth century. (See "Finnish,
Polish, and Russian Neighborhoods in Minneapolis, 1934,"
http://www.mpls.lib.mn.us/history/images/fpr_map.gif.)
Many other neighborhoods and streets share their names with
nationally prominent political and literary figures from the latter half of
the nineteenth century, roughly from the era just before statehood to the
era just after Minneapolis's incorporation and emergence as a major economic
hub. I don't know for sure whether these neighborhoods and streets are named
after the national figures themselves, or after namesakes with a better
local connection. But here is some uninformed speculation:
Three neighborhoods share their names with a series of
late-nineteenth-century presidents: Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, and
William McKinley. Two streets share their names with an earlier president
and vice-president: Ulysses S. Grant and his vice-president, Schuyler P.
Colfax. (Grant followed A. Johnson and preceded Hayes, but the presence of a
Grant Street in downtown Minneapolis caused the street between Johnson and
Hayes in northeast Minneapolis to be named "Ulysses" instead of "Grant.")
A few neighborhoods share their names with lesser political figures
from the mid- to late nineteenth century: John C. Calhoun, vice-president in
the J.Q. Adams and Jackson administrations, later a senator from South
Carolina in the years leading up to the Compromise of 1850 (which Calhoun
himself opposed, but which delayed the Civil War during the decade when
Minnesota was seeking statehood); Seward, secretary of state in the Lincoln
and A. Johnson administrations; Charles Sumner, a senator and prominent
abolitionist during the Civil War and Reconstruction; and William Windom,
treasury secretary in the Garfield and Arthur administrations.
A few neighborhoods and bodies of water take their names from the
poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his poem "Song of Hiawatha," which
featured the characters Hiawatha, Minnehaha, and Nokomis. The Minneapolis
connection with Longfellow is obvious, but several other neighborhoods share
their names with Longfellow's contemporary literary figures William Cullen
Bryant, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and John Greenleaf
Whittier.
As I said, the connection between these latter-nineteenth-century
political and literary figures and the Minneapolis neighborhoods that share
their names is speculation on my part. But it does seem like a lot of
coincidences, and would account for at least a dozen neighborhoods' names.
BRM
Brian Melendez
St. Anthony West (Ward 3)
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