1893 Duluth

That is completely sweet!!!

I certainly could play with this thing all day.

Here's a zoom in on the Sacred Heart Cathedral and Duluth High School.



This depiction of Sacred Heart seems to loom larger than the real thing. I'm pretty sure that Sacred Heart didn't actually even exist in 1893. The original cathedral burned in 1892 and the building in the drawing wasn't finished until 1896.

The new Duluth High School had just opened in 1892. It later became known as Duluth Central High School and is now the Central Administration Building, or "Old Central."



Here's the Duluth Harbor Basin and Rice's Point:



Here's the shipping canal and downtown area:

I found my parent's house and saw that my current neighborhood was aligned wonky back in the day (8th & 27th west). The detail in that thing is crazy!
I pulled up a similar St. Paul map too - who's job was it to draw all those tiny little houses, and why? Imagine how long it must have taken someone to do all that.

This is really cool! Just wish it include more of the east side so we could see what the area around UMD looked like way back then.

*included

I'm not sure anything around the UMD area was developed at all. If memory serves me right, the UMD location was a swamp/marshland.

In the map it looks like everything above 10th Street is largely undeveloped, too, and I can attest that today what remains undeveloped (the area around the Antenna Farm, and way further up the hill by the mall area) is also swampy marshland.

There is a gully/ravine on the eastern side of the map around the area where 6th Ave E would be.  Is that Brewery Creek?  I live near Brewery Creek, and it's kind of nice to see it above ground and running, even if only in an old drawing.

Very cool; I immediately zoomed into Central, too. Some of the area around UMD was farmed; mostly dairy farms, some in the same vein as the Hartley farms. I interviewed some of the elderly neighbors in the '90s, and they remembered walking across pastures to go get chocolate milk from the local dairies where UMD now sits. The new campus only began construction in the '50s or so, I think.

Perspective map of Duluth, Minn. 1887

Seeing Change Over Time: Duluth Minnesota, 1870-1913

View of Duluth, Minn. 1883

The twin ports, Superior, Wisconsin, Duluth, Minnesota. 1915