Camp Coldwater
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Camp Coldwater was an early European settlement in Minnesota, USA, as well as an area of several springs that were important to Native Americans. Camp Coldwater is located adjacent to the Mississippi River in south Minneapolis, directly south of Minnehaha Park.
The camp was explored by early European settlers who were in the process of building Fort Snelling. On May 5, 1820, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Leavenworth moved his troops to the area because their former encampment, on the Minnesota River, was causing unhealthy conditions. (He was succeeded by Colonel Josiah Snelling in August of that year. The soldiers lived in tents and huts on the site during three summers while they built the permanent stone fort south of the location. The spring continued to supply water to the fort, first via water wagons and then via a stone water tower and underground pipes. Settlers who had left the Selkirk Colony settled near the location in 1821, but were forced to leave in 1840. They moved down the Mississippi River and settled in what eventually became Saint Paul, Minnesota. The Coldwater area once housed blacksmith shops, stables, trading posts, a hotel, and a steamboat landing, but nearly all of those buildings were gone by the time of the American Civil War.[1]
The site is located on the United States Bureau of Mines property east of Minnesota State Highway 55.
[edit] Quotes
Early in the Spring [of 1820] Col. Leavenworth discovered the fountain of water where the troops now are, & to which they moved as soon as the ice would permit. It is a healthy situation, about 200 feet above the river, and the water gushing out of a lime stone rock is excellent. It is called "Camp Cold Water."
—James Duane Doty, Camp Cold Water, July 31, 1820
[It is] a situation which is extremely salubrious, and where they will remain until the permanent works [Fort St. Anthony, later Fort Snelling] are completed upon the bluff at the junction of the two rivers.
—Henry Schoolcraft, July 29, 1820
I was a little surprised on arriving here, to find that there is no such place as St. Peters proper. Fort Snelling, New Hope, and Camp Coldwater, comprise all the settlements here; and St. Peters seems to have been used, by common consent, as a name for the whole settlement around the mouth of the St. Peters river (Minnesota River), which empties into the Mississippi here, seven miles below the falls of St. Anthony.
—Benjamin T. Kavanaugh, November 5, 1839
[edit] References
- ^ Rubenstein, Sarah P. (2003). Minnesota History Along the Highways. Minnesota Historical Society. ISBN 0-87351-456-4.
- An exhibit that has appeared at Fort Snelling State Park, the Hennepin History Museum Minnesota, and the Longfellow House in Minneapolis.
