St. Bonifacius Minnesota

On April 10, 1858, Township 117 Range 24 was set aside by the Hennepin County commissioners as “German Home.”

Earlier in the decade, Yankees (or English-speaking) settlers came across the bays of Upper Lake Minnetonka and began staking out claims in the northern half of the township; at the same time German-speaking settlers moved into the southern half after trekking north from the river cities of Shakopee, Chaska, and Carver. Claiming and staking out tracts of land, each group was almost ignorant of the other's existence.

In the spring of 1859, residents of the township met at the Lake Minnetonka home of M.S. Cook to take steps for the organization of the township. A new name for the township was proposed and accepted:"Minnetrista". (The name in Dakota meant "crooked lake", likely referencing Whaletail Lake.)

The settlement in the township’s southwest corner continued to be called German Home. The name St. Bonifacius was probably used concurrently with German Home. The former name received de facto recognition when, in 1856, the U.S. government established a post office on Section 30 and called it St. Bonifacius.

St. Bonifacius was incorporated in 1904. At that time, the village had a population of about 250 and had become a very active service center for a large prosperous rural population. There was a hardware store, a harness shop, a hotel, a saw and feed mill, a state of the art creamery, a bank, a general merchandise store, a blacksmith shop, and a bank.

This was the “Golden Age” for St. Bonifacius and for many other small towns across America. In 1904 the Great Northern was routed through town and further spurred development: another hotel, a furniture store and mortuary, another blacksmith shop, a barber shop and confectionary, a meat market, another bank, a livery business, a grain elevator, several saloons, a millinery, an electrical shop, several car dealerships, a lumber yard, two coal companies, and a stock yard. Most prominently, though, was the Minnetonka Canning Factory spearheaded by Matt Hegerle. Over the next twenty years, it was to become one of the largest canning factories in the Midwest.

By the end of the ‘20s, this “Golden Age” had come to an end. The lumber yard burned down, the two banks closed, the canning factory stopped production, and curbside businesses were boarded up; St. Boni’s population stagnated.