Over 10,000 years ago, the Wisconsin glacier covered present-day Frogtown. As the glacier retreated, it left deposits along the way, one of which may have formed the hill that now rises above the surrounding homes. A tunnel under the glacier could have formed Como Lake and a smaller lake just north of the Frogtown Farm site, which has since disappeared. A stream flowing through the tunnel would have deposited sand and gravel at the Frogtown Farm site.
By the mid-1700s, Dakota people from
Kaposia, a seasonal village along the
Mississippi River, were moving north across the landscape in search of food. They hunted over a wide range of Minnesota’s vast prairies and forests. In all likelihood they commonly traversed the hillside that will soon become
Frogtown Park and Farm, and the swampy land that surrounds it.
The property was part of the land the Dakota ceded to the United States in 1837 Treaty with the Sioux. As settlers carved out new living space in the growing frontier town of Saint
Paul, the Dakota presence diminished. (1)
Photo: Dakota tipis near St. Paul
Early Non-Native Settlement
Frogtown has often been the immigrant's first Minnesota stop in a journey that started in another part of the world.
Its streets were first platted in the
1850s, with settlement beginning in the area around University and Rice St.
Early residents were predominately
Germans, Austrians and Hungarians.
But the presence of ethnically-based
Left: Dahlem Nicholas Wagner house,
388 Charles Street, 1885

churches gives another view of the neighborhood population. For instance, St. Agnes
Catholic Church served German-speaking residents. St. Adalbert's was a Polish parish, while St. Vincent's congregation was largely Irish.
Eastern European Jews and African-Americans moved in later in the 19th and early 20th centuries, according to the Historic St. Paul booklet, Tour St. Paul: Frogtown . (2)
Notable African American Frogtowners included Charles James and Fredrick McGhee.
James was a leader in the Boot and Shoe Workers Union in the early 20th century.
McGhee, the son of slaves, became one of the country's first African-American lawyers, and was in 1904 a co-founder of the Niagara Movement, forerunner of the NAACP.
Employment opportunities were plentiful at the railroad shops at Dale and Jackson
Streets, and at the St. Paul Foundry steel plant immediately north of the rail line near
Dale Street. The neighborhood, filled with working class homes, was dotted with small businesses along University Avenue and in commercial nodes on Rice, Dale, Western and Victoria. "At one point in the early 20th century, the neighborhood had more than four dozen small grocery stores, fruit and meat markets, and confectioneries," the
Historic St. Paul report notes.

With the end of the Vietnam War, Frogtown became home to Vietnamese and Hmong refugees. Asians and Pacific Islanders now make up about a third of Frogtown's population. (3) Somalis have more recently resettled in the area following ongoing conflict in East Africa.
Three answers, in increasing order of likelihood:
1) Early settlers of Frogtown were of French descent. A familiar derogatory term for the
French is Frogs. Hence, Frogtown.
2) Frogtown was home to a pair of Great Northern Railroad rail car and locomotive shops, one on Dale and Minnehaha, the other on Pennsylvania near I35. "Frogger" is a term for a tool used to switch cars or engines between tracks. Hence, Frogtown.
3. Frogtown was a low, swampy area, inhabited by a large number of frogs. This from the diary of St. Paul Catholic priest Alexis Hoffman, 1863-1940: "You will not find the designation of Frogtown on the map: it lives in local, oral tradition and will live although the cheerful, monotonous warbling of the swamp canaries has been hushed forever.
Perhaps the appropriateness of the name will be better appreciated when you remember that the region was originally, for the greater part, a tamarack swamp. The swamp aforesaid was rather a damp and lonely place and abounded in frogs of all sizes and degrees of vocal power. On summer evenings a patriarchal croaker would entone a rich and unctuous 'quonk,' which would be followed by a long drawn, many-voiced response for hours and hours." Hence, Frogtown. (3)
The Frogtown Park and Farm site has long been a place devoted to bettering the lives of
Frogtowners and people throughout St. Paul. More than 130 years ago, the hilltop was chosen by the Sisters of the Good Shepherd as a site for the House of the Good
Shepherd. (4)
The home — still remembered by long-time Frogtowners with a spooked-out shiver — was a place where girls and young women got what was then termed "moral rehabilitation." The push that got the home started was provided in the mid-1860s by
Catholic Bishop Thomas Langdon Grace, who was dismayed to see that Catholics were among St. Paul's collection of fallen women — the period's euphemism for the unmarried pregnant and prostitutes. Bishop Grace sent away to St. Louis for help.
The river town was the nearest outpost of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd. The order, based in France, then owned the franchise on female moral rehab. Its 3,000 nuns took care of nearly 17,000 girls in 110 homes scattered throughout the world. The sisters

started with troubled girls, taught them domestic skills, and helped them find straight work as maids, laundry workers or dressmakers.
Below: House of the Good Shepherd, 1900
The sisters left for the two-day riverboat trip from St. Louis to
St. Paul on May 18, 1868.
Once arrived, they set up their operation in a rented house on
Smith St. By the end of the year, 18 girls and women had entered their program.
Newspaper accounts of the time noted the "Puritan simplicity" of the sisters' establishment — the small rooms, the bare floors, the basement dining hall. A St.
Paul Pioneer reporter, making a tour of the home, observed that he recognized several girls from the street. They "have been living a life of sin and misery in this city for some years back, but yesterday had a subdued and quiet appearance under their Quaker bonnets, which argued well for their future reformation," he wrote.
A year later the nuns moved to a larger stone building overlooking the river levee and railroad tracks. The sisters broke the girls into three rough groups: "pre-delinquent children"; "repentant women who felt called to the religious life"; and "friendless young girls temporarily unemployed."
Seeking refuge from both increasing railroad noise and the crumbling river bluffs, in
1881 the sisters bought 22.5 acres surrounding the hillside where the Wilder Foundation later perched. The property had one obvious plus — "an excellent view of the surrounding unsettled land," as John Edward Forliti termed it in his 1961 history of the home. But it had a few small problems as well — such as no water, sewer or roads. The sisters started building, completing the first of several wings in 1883. They steadily added more space for dormitories, chapels, a commercial laundry and classrooms.
About 20 percent of the clientele reached the sisters via the courts, sent by judges hoping to impose a lifestyle change. Other prostitutes checked themselves in, writes Joel Best in his history of St. Paul prostitution, Controlling Vice , because "they were pregnant, angry with their lovers or sincerely interested in reform." Other residents were girls who had been orphaned, were homeless or otherwise neglected, or who were committed by their parents. Those who volunteered to stay with the sisters were encouraged to remain for six months to a year.

Inside the home, their lives were tightly controlled. Girls got up at 5 a.m. for prayer and
Mass, then moved on to study, work, and a few hours of recreation. Lights went out at 10 p.m. Girls in the reformatory wing were attended by a mistress almost 24 hours a day.
They were given new first names when they arrived. Their last names were never used.
Their visitors, Forliti writes, were restricted to people of "upright character."
As the picture above reveals, the structure itself had a Castle of Dracula ambience that put neighbors on edge. "My son had a paper route and they were subscribers up there," remembered Lafond Ave. resident (now deceased) Emma Filiowich. "It was spooky looking and scary as heck up there when it was still dark. We'd run in with the paper and run out again as fast as we could."
Her husband, John, grew up in a house on the hillside. He remembers the nuns walking among the numerous flower gardens with their arms folded. There were statues, ahead of which the nuns would pray, plus a greenhouse, roller rink and picnic area. He doesn't recall seeing the girls often, except on those occasions when a pair of girls would hop over the fence and run like mad to escape.
As a neighbor, however, he experienced kindnesses. On cold nights the nuns would invite him and his friends in to watch movies in their small theater. And on the very coldest nights, he would bang on the door of the boiler room. The boilerman would let him in to warm up around the coal-fired furnaces.
By August, 1969, the sisters had departed for a new home in North Oaks. The St. Paul
Pioneer Press ran a final gallery of photos of the deserted building, picturing the effort to strip the hulk of valuables that could be sold off before the wrecking ball fell.
Above: Christmas at the House of the Good Shepherd, 1900
Almost 100 years ago, the plan for the Frogtown Park and Farm site was to line the southern portion with homes. Plat maps from 1916 show residential lots extending from
Blair Avenue and over the hill to the west.

In the end, plans for new homes were trumped by the gravel and cement industry, which took advantage of the glacial deposits underlaying the site. The St. Paul Cement
Company was based at the corner of Chatsworth and Lafond, and operated roughly from before 1914 to 1958. At Victoria and Minnehaha, Lange Brothers Sand, Gravel and
Cement Blocks Company was in business during the same period of time.
"These extraction activities continued for up to 50 years, and may have consumed the entire hill had the house of the Good Shepherd not stood on its crest," observed
University of Minnesota Metropolitan Design Center researchers in their publication,
Discovering Frogtown . (5) Gravel mining changed the character of the site, making the slopes along the east and west boundaries more precipitous. "Prior to mining operations," said the University report, "these slopes would have been gentler, covered with native oak savanna communities in association with the rolling topography…"

St. Paul Cement Works, 1914
In 1969, The Amherst Wilder Foundation bought the House of the Good Shepherd site.
The location served as a home for the foundation's rehab programs and for its headquarters.
The foundation is the namesake of Amherst H. Wilder, a businessman who moved to St.
Paul from New York and joined family members in stage transportation business. By the
1860s he had branched out to railroad, lumber, banking, insurance, real estate and merchandising interests. The Foundation was formed in 1906 to serve the poor, elderly and ailing.
The Foundation's current work is focused in the areas children and families, older adults, and community, research and leadership. The Foundation moved to a new headquarters at
Lexington and University in 2008, opening its former site for development. (6)
Notes
1. Site history for Frogtown Gardens, Siri Simons, 2011. Notes regarding Dakota history:
Pond, Samuel. The Dakota or Sioux As They Were in 1834. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical
Society, 1986
2. Tour St. Paul: Frogtown , Historic St. Paul, http://historicsaintpaul.org/node/515
3. St. Paul Neighborhood Profile, Planning District 7, Frogtown/Thomas Dale , Wilder
Research summary of 2010 Census Data, http://www.mncompass.org/_pdfs/neighborhood-profiles/StPaul-FrogtownThomasDale-
102011.pdf
3. Journal of Alexis Hoffman , http://www.frogtownmn.org/sites/default/files/Frogtown%20Journal%20-
%20Hoffman%20-%20Compressed_0.pdf

4. Frogtown Times, May, 2000
5. Discovering Frogtown: A contextual Evaluation of the Wilder Foundation Site ,
Metropolitan Design Center, College of Design, University of Minnesota, http://www.designcenter.umn.edu/projects/documents/FrogtownReportfinal.pdf
6. About Us: History , Amherst Wilder Foundation website,
(http://www.wilder.org/AboutUs/Wilder-History/Pages/default.aspx
Photos
Dakota tipis : http://collections.mnhs.org/cms/display.php?irn=10680557&websites=no&brand=cms&q
=dakota%20tipis&startindex=1&count=25
Nicholas Wagner House : http://collections.mnhs.org/cms/display.php?irn=10711493&websites=no&brand=cms&q
=nicholas%20wagner%20house&startindex=1&count=25
Dale Street Shops : http://collections.mnhs.org/cms/display.php?irn=10828383&websites=no&brand=cms&q
=dale%20street%20shops&startindex=1&count=25
House of the Good Shepherd : http://collections.mnhs.org/cms/display.php?irn=10714687&websites=no&brand=cms&q
=house%20of%20the%20good%20shepherd&startindex=1&count=25
Christmas at the House of the Good Shepherd : http://collections.mnhs.org/cms/display.php?irn=10663532&websites=no&brand=cms&q
=house%20of%20the%20good%20shepherd&startindex=1&count=25
Aerial View, House of the Good Shepherd, 1947, US Geological Survey : http://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/metadata/4660/AR1DV0000040055/
St. Paul Cement : http://collections.mnhs.org/cms/display.php?irn=10820085&websites=no&brand=cms&q
=saint%20paul%20cement&startindex=1&count=25