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Spatial Historical Demography in the Walking City;
Using address-rich microdata to observe neighborhood socio-economic stratification in
Minneapolis, MN 1848-1881
A PLAN B PROJECT
SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
BY
Mark Anthony Magnuson
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SCIENCE
June 2010

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Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to analyze and discuss historical point data and to use
aggregation as method to better understand social and economic stratification in 19th-
century American ―walking‖ cities, especially Minneapolis from settlement to 1881.
Geographical Information Science, advanced spatial analysis techniques, newly available
robust micro datasets, and social network theories provide opportunities to examine cities
at scales previously unavailable.
Address-rich historical data, such as those found in work, school, church directories and
the censuses, have potential to provide a solid quantitative framework in developing rich
narrative histories of urban society. By using Address-level data, analysis can be
performed as traditional cross tabulation, relational points, or within historical
administrative boundaries. To better understand history the researcher can create flexible
user defined boundaries, and employ a host of spatial statistical methods (clustering,
population density, journey to work networks) as well as choices in visualization in order
to better understand urban history.
Geocoding data from Minneapolis city directories and the U.S. census was employed in
order to analyze and visualize the development of infrastructural and residential social
stratification patterns in Minneapolis, Minnesota prior to public transportation, focusing
on the years 1859-1860, 1867 and 1880-1881.
Keywords: Urban History, Economic History, Historical Demography, Historical GIS, Social
Stratification, Suburbanization
Word count: 22,703

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In memory of Professor Roger Miller

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Table of Contents
List of Maps
Introduction
Chapter 1: Literature Review
The 19th
century ―Walking City‖
Spatial Social Stratification
Historical GIS and use of address point data
Chapter 2: Methods and Error
Techniques and limitations of aggregated demographic
spatial data
Inconsistency and implied accuracy in address-rich data
Methods for accounting for error
Chapter 3: Spatial social stratification in Minneapolis; from settlement to
1881
Plotting pre-emptive Plats (1838-1855)
Urbanization and industrialization
Testing transport, fire protection and education in 1880
Conclusion
Bibliography

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List of Maps
Map 1: Theodore Hershberg’s 1981, Computer Generated
DENPRINT Grid Map of Philadelphia with Alpha
and Numeric Symbolization 15
Map 2: Occupational stratification in Manhattan 1791; using mean center 20
Map 3: Occupational stratification in Boston 1789 and 1800 by streets 21
Map 4: Occupational stratification in Philadelphia; 1790- 1791 22
Map 5: Brooklyn in 1840 as a mixed but occupationally stratified suburb 28
Map 6: Visualization of Boston’s streetcar suburbs 30
Map 7: Mapping the spatial transformation of residential
Boston using laborers and lawyers 1845-1875 31
Map 8: Aggregating address point data to varying scales over time 38
Map 9: Mapping error in Philadelphia 1790- 1791 45
Map 10: Distribution of missing cases for Minneapolis 1880 U.S. Census. 55
Map11: Marketing rural plats as city property; Stevens and Cheever 59
Map12: Land additions developed between, 1855-1861 71
Map 13: Occupational and gender 1860 maps 73
Map 14: Spatial changes in birthplace, gender, and children; 1860, 1870 74
Map15: Choropleth and cluster analysis of 1880 males by 2000 Blocks 79
Map16: Urban population drift using mean center; 1848-1881 80
Map17: Transportation infrastructure buffer 83
Map18: Addresses near streetcars 1881 85
Map19: Distances to fire alarms and stations 88
Map20: Distance to work and school 90
Map 21: Student to Teacher Ratio Minneapolis 1880 93

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Introduction
Development of urban space often includes groups or individuals who secure, then invest
in space with the greatest capital return (economic, social, and human). Nation-states
established forts at the most important points of communication routes, manufacturers
snatched advantageous shoreline along navigable and swift flowing waterways, and
groups and individuals of varying social and economic status (or buying power)
purchased the real estate which connected (or separated) them with specific communities.
While in most metropolitan areas, the properties were divided up by the most influential
citizenry over the course of many generations, the specific combination of people and
events accelerated the speed in which the ―premier‖ space in Minneapolis was acquired
and held. This paper analyzes and visualizes the relationship of Minneapolis society to
the space in which it resided, worked and socialized, from settlement until 1881.
The period covered has been described as the ―walking‖ or ―pedestrian city‖ in prior
urban history literature (Warner 1962: 2). This time period has been highly generalized,
often spanning from ancient history through the introduction of mass transit, such as
suburban steam ferry or streetcar, without attention to topographical and historical urban
variations. The research will look beyond the nostalgic and overly simplified historical
pedestrian city that is currently conjured up when providing planning alternatives to
urban sprawl. Such arguments imply that transportation technology profoundly altered
urban human behavior from an integrated ―unified city‖ into a volatile, divided urban
space. While the physical, social and political impact of transportation on the urban
environment is well established, the aging center city’s transition into industrial-
capitalism has been based on limited narrative historical sources and should now be

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supported with empirical evidence as the data become available. Advancing our historical
understanding of the walking city is especially important as the practical need for
designing pedestrian scaled cities becomes more acute in light of the growing
infrastructure and environmental costs which are related to present suburban land uses
(Adams 1988: 129).
There are three chapters which introduce theory, methods and sources covering general
historical urban space as well as focusing on the city of Minneapolis during its formative
years. The first chapter will address the urban historical literature’s portrayal of the city
prior to technology’s impact, focusing specifically on the three most commonly
referenced American cities: New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. From these cities
spatial methods are employed to analyze and visualize urban demographic data
comparing them to prior literature. The second chapter will introduce address-rich
sources and methods, analyzing their imperfect, yet vital role in understanding early
industrial cities. The final chapter will use complete-count microdata from Minneapolis
city directories, United States censuses, a Minnesota Territorial census, and high schools
graduate roles, to analyze spatial social stratification during the first three decades of
Minneapolis’ history. (The censuses include 1849, 1850, 1857, 1860, 1870, and 1880
and city directories from 1859-1860, 1867-1868, and 1880-1881) The local history is
divided into three stages; the settlement period between 1848 and 1855, urbanization and
―suburbanization‖ in the boom and bust period of 1855 through 1874, and the beginning
of large scale industrialization 1875-1881. In the decade following 1880, Minneapolis
climbed in the U.S. population rankings from 38th
to 18th
place (46,887 to 164,738).

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Throughout the paper, particular attention is paid to lawyers, bank directors and
laborer/lumbermen as indicators of status. Social status for these occupations remained
relatively static both inter-regionally and throughout the time period covered. These
three represent two of the highest and one of the lowest mean wealth occupational classes
supported by wealth measures in Philadelphia, Detroit and Minneapolis/St. Anthony for
1860 (Blumin 1969: 169 McCoy 1991:187-188, U.S. Federal Census 1860). During the
final period, three city infrastructures are analyzed in relation to residences from these
three occupational classes using 1880-1881 address data. These infrastructures include:
residential nearness to major transportation infrastructure, distance to fire alarms and
stations, and access and distance to a high school.
The results of research found that spatial social stratification was embedded in the
settlement process through networks formed at Fort Snelling. These social networks
provided the actors with lucrative riparian rights and acres of residential property
adjacent to the largest milling power source in North America. These rights were then
converted to capital and political positions, as lumber mills and need for residential
property began to grow. Spatially defined social stratification appears to remain a
consistent behavior throughout the three periods regardless of the technological advances.
The pace at which Minneapolitans expanded out from the Hennepin Avenue bridge
depended on the economic conditions; quickening during the land speculative periods of
1855-1857, 1867-1872, and throughout the 1880’s, while stagnating in the years between
the panic of 1857 and year after the Civil War as well as the panic of 1873. Furthermore
the push towards the periphery was not limited to high-status jobs but included laborers.

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While the South-Central, Northeast and Northwest had growth in laborer occupied areas,
influential Minneapolitans maintained the southwest region. Movement by the city’s
elite appears only to be affected by the development of increasingly large boarding
houses in the proximity of the growing mill district near the river at the time.
Test on infrastructures reveal that residential housing owned by professionals, favored
areas outside a 50 meter buffer from trains and industry, but within 50 meter buffers of
the streetcar’s routes. Meanwhile residential areas for the laboring classification had the
greatest distance to telegraph fire alarms, although the pressure on the city to keep up
with expansion was not necessarily related to high or low occupational status. The final
analysis observes the removal of the high school in 1878 from the center city, out to the
area coinciding with high status jobs. The new high school building shared space with the
mean center of the parent’s homes of high school graduates for the period 1871-1880.
Linking these students to the census revealed that nearly all male graduate parents were
of high-status occupations.

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Chapter I. Literature Review: Historical GIS, Social Stratification and the Walking City
Introduction
Minneapolis’ specific spatial history for this period requires three underlying areas of
study. The first is to consider approaches and expectations when addressing the related
period described generally as the pedestrian city. The second is to cover how the various
academic fields have addressed spatial social stratification or segregation. The third will
briefly observe the developments of methodology of analysis and visualization within
HGIS.
Throughout the 19th
and 20th
century urban researchers, when faced with the complexity
of urban space and the data collection and digitization challenges, have chosen either to,
aggregate to the best methods of their time or simply reduce the scale of their research.
While the 19th
century produced sporadic examples of urban spatial analysis (Snow 1965:
238, Du Bois 2007, Hull 1967), interest in human ecology, as a presented by the
sociologists from the ―Chicago School,‖ began to use spatial aggregation, exemplified by
the model of circular zoning surrounding Chicago’s ―Loop‖ (Parks and Burgess 1925:
55). Armed with an immense Federal Real Property Inventory dataset, supplied to the
Federal Housing Administration by the Civil Works Administration, from 1934-1936, the
economist Homer Hoyt presented, ―a series of techniques by which the terra incognita of
the city may be mapped and charted.‖ He did so by wading through data from a
staggering 204 urban places (Hoyt 1939). Using these cities, his analytical visualizations
included; mapping U.S. cities residential information to the block-level, a five variable-
block-level overlay of Richmond, VA, and two dozen metropolitan land use maps, which
included several representing growth over time. Hoyt expanded on Burgess’ concentric

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circle visualization by producing a series of theoretical maps in which he added pie-cut
sectors to urban time series maps (ibid: 77). Urban spatial analysis first came from
sociology and economic researchers studying their contemporary urban environments,
but by the early 1960’s, historians were faced with wide spread urban ―blight‖ and unrest
in their cities. The conditions of the modern city caused urban historian to look back into
19th
century cities and suburbs for roots to the modern urban problems.
The Walking City
Sam Bass Warner’s Streetcar Suburbs, Kenneth Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontiers, Lewis
Mumford’s The City in History, and David Ward’s Cities and Immigrants continue to be
perennial readings in many undergraduate and graduate urban history and planning
courses, each providing relevant insight into factors which contributed to destabilizing
urban space. However, all of these works broadly aggregate the pedestrian city without
regarding time and/or space. Specifically, Sam Bass Warner states that he is unable to
apply sociological class analysis with only the census and legal records having survived,
so he proceeds to tell the story of Boston’s transition to a ―city divided,‖ by relying on
―parks, streets, pipes, the tracks, the houses.‖ His results reveal that the Boston’s urban
landscape was greatly altered by the upper and middle class’ response to
industrialization, capital, immigration and urbanization (Warner 1962: 4). To Warner, the
city became divided between those eager to participate in ―getting ahead‖ (which
included altering land use) and those who did or could not participate. Meanwhile,
Kenneth T. Jackson’s (1985) Crabgrass Frontier, employs a somewhat wider range of

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historical material including some small samples of censuses and city directories to
support urban history narratives.
With little empirical evidence, the two authors rely on historical source materials which
have traditionally favored powerful and sedentary actors within influential cities. This
bias has resulted in a romanticized history of the pre-industrial ―walking city,‖ which
continues in contemporary urban literature (Macauley 2000: 3-43). The implication of
their research has assumed a break from past human behavior, specifically associated
with industrialization, placing the catalyst squarely on the transportation revolution.
Urban transportation mobility moved the city from stable and unified towns, into the
inefficient divided urban system (Mumford 1961: 560-561, Warner 1962: 5).
David Ward (1971) also follows this trend, citing Gideon Sjoberg’s The Pre-Industrial
City as his reference to the pre-1850 transportation-starved urban society. A simplistic
society in which the wealthy resided at the center of the city and poor relegated to the
periphery. British urban historian David Goodman first questions Sjoberg’s aggregation
of time and space, and then takes further exception to Sjoberg’s assumption that it was
primitive transport and illiteracy that forced various occupations to cluster together
(Ward 1971: 105 Goodman 2000: 342). Betsy Blackmar (1979) also rejects the idea of a
historical unified city. She writes that the appearance of such a city in maps and anecdotal
contemporary descriptions was not supported by evidence which she examined, such as
―the distribution and management of land, the transformation of production, the
formation of the urban real estate and housing markets, and the reorganization of the
building industry,‖ all of which supported a stratified urban space (Blackmar 1979:131-
148). Mary M. Schweitzer (1993) also takes exception to behavior distinction between

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industrial and mercantilist city structure in Philadelphia while looking into the tax
records, city directories and census records. Schweitzer found a high occurrence of
occupational clustering in which the wealthy often avoided the high rent districts with
their tight quarters, opting for the more inexpensive periphery (Schweitzer 1993: 32-34).
The literature’s classical understanding of suburbia as a wealthy and middle class
phenomenon has also been questioned. In Todd Kelley Gardner’s doctoral thesis (1998),
Gardner analyzes metropolitan urban and fringe areas prior to World War II using
IPUMS data on metropolitan districts.
Percent occupation type within the central cities
Low-status High-status
1850 19.4 27
1880 19.4 32.4
1910 16 37.2
His findings for all large metropolitan areas show a drop in low-status occupation within
central cities as well as an increase in the central city by high-status occupations. When
Annexation was included, the numbers did not significantly alter (Gardner 1998: 183).
This is the opposite affect from the traditional assumption that the result of the transition
of walking non-industrial city to mechanized industrial city, moved the wealthy and
middle class out to the fringe while the lower status occupation simply moved from the
fringes to take up residence in the older housing stock.

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The literature’s generalizations often do not account for peripheral cities or any
consideration of the city’s function, topography, period of expansion or the time specific
interaction between them (Connolly 2008: 3). The literature’s lack of an empirical
framework has led to two misconceptions which included the lacked class stratification
with pre-industrial pedestrian city (with the exception of swamp periphery settlements),
as well as claims that suburbanization was a wealthy or middle class phenomenon in
which the lower income or laborers simply filled in the areas where the wealthy had
aging housing. Simplistically portraying a society that moved away from common ideas
and experiences into a class-divided urban landscape, creates the assumption that the
residences in pre-industrial cities were somehow less motivated by property and class.
The dichotomy especially neglects migration and life course. Both migratory temporal
processes require demographic data to observe the impact of increasing/decreasing
numbers of (im)migrants and or age group categories. For example, the input of
thousands of younger, often unmarried workers, places demands for boarding houses.
Likewise, as these workers go through normative life cycles, demand favors family
housing. Economic booms set in motion abnormal age and gender distributions
compared to steady growth. Continuing to rely on simplified binary analysis of wealth
verses no wealth’s use of space, stunts development in urban history.

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Historical GIS and Urban History
Map 1. Theodore Hershberg’s 1981, Computer Generated DENPRINT Grid Map of
Philadelphia with Alpha and Numeric Symbols
Philadelphia by Theodore Hershberg, provided an empirical framework to the urban
history cannon. Hershberg was present at New Urban History Conference in 1968 and
was the first to attempt urban Historical GIS. Philadelphia was the result of the
Philadelphia Social History Project (PSHP) which used address-rich datasets, such as city
directories and census materials, in order to help develop a spatial history of Philadelphia.
Unfortunately, the PSHP and the New Urban History Movement were born premature.
Hershberg provided the last rites in the first chapter of Philadelphia published in 1981,
stating the movement had, ―an ambitious beginning, proved a dead end.‖ Hershberg
blamed the failure on the inability for historians to interact in an interdisciplinary manner
and felt that the field needed to approach the city as a stage and not as a site (Hershberg
1981: 22). The computing and methodology required for data development, analysis and

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visualization were simply not in place when many of the New Urban Historians
attempted to power their punch cards into the complex networks of the industrializing
city. Unfortunately, Hirshberg’s novel attempt at Historical GIS, through using computer
mapping, didn’t fare much better. Although the technique worked for visualizing large-
scale continuous data such as drought and weather histories (Lanegran and Palm 1973:
40-41), it was confusing for complex small-scale representations of historical cities. Both
the analysis and visualization drew particular opposition from Alan Dawley in a 1979
article in the Radical History Review whose popular sentiments were echoed in the field
of history and ultimately lead to a sharp decline in quantitative history throughout the
1980’s and 1990’s (Krousser 1984: 133-49). Dawley blasted Hirshberg’s work saying,
―On the crudest level, ―ethnicity‖ and class are reduced to variables, to be toted up in the
fancy gridwork of a pseudo-social science alongside religion, party affiliation, years of
schooling, distance from work, etc.‖ He continues in the notes stating the PSHP was, ―an
example of the crackpot empiricism that results when data volume drowns out social
science theory‖ (Dawley 1979: 40). Dawley’s sentiments about ―crackpot empiricism‖
are alive today as well. Anne Knowles explains that the science part of the GIS name,
continues to be considered deterministic in some circles (Knowles 2008: 2-3).
Unfortunately, Hirshberg as well as many of his quantitative contemporaries were
drowning in data, suffering from extending spatial and quantitative historical research far
beyond the technical and methodological developments in data production, analysis, and
visualization.

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Since the 1980’s, advancements in spatial analysis using GIS have moved into history via
the social sciences. Luc Anselin was among the first to establish methodology within
spatial analysis for the social sciences. This came after he recognized that only one of the
forty peer reviewed articles for regional science and urban economics addressed spatial
dependence ―rigorously‖ (Anselin and Hudak 1992: 509-36). Later in the decade, at the
Social Science History Association (SSHA) annual meetings, Historical GIS sessions
were introducing spatial analysis to the broader social science history community. In
2000, Anne Kelley Knowles called on the field to accept and develop GIS to address
spatial elements of History (Knowles 2000: 451). By October 2008, Historical GIS had
received strong traction within interdisciplinary history as shown by more than 30
Historical GIS presentations during the SSHA 2008 Conference (Social Science History
Association 2008). Since Knowles called for the development of accurate historical
boundaries in her introduction in 2000, many national historical GIS institutions have
answered, including the Great Britain Historical GIS Project, followed by the American
―National Historical GIS‖ completed in 2006, and then the Canadian Century Research
Infrastructure completed in 2008 (Gregory and Southall 1998: 210, Fitch and Ruggles
2003, Gaffield 2007). National historical spatial datasets such as these, continue to
supply block through state aggregate data, which has been useful in analyzing census data
both across regions and through time. Boundary shapefiles such as those developed by
these spatial organizations have opened the door to further analysis from a variety of
historical data sources with both greater and smaller scales. During the past five years,
Historical GIS has begun to move from the developmental stage, focusing on creating
polygon boundary files for use with aggregated data best suited for economists and

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sociologists (Logan and Zhang 2006), towards greater source integration within broader
historical subjects. The most recent example urban history using individual-level data
was published in August of 2009 for the Social Science Computer Review. In this article
Donald Debats examines the use of city directories, voter registration and home
ownership in his article ―Using GIS and Individual-Level Data for Whole communities:
A Path Toward the Reconciliation of Political and Social History‖ (DuBats 2009: 324-
325). In 2007, sociologist John Logan from Brown University was awarded an NSF
grant, which adds address data to the complete count 1880 U. S. census housed at the
Minnesota Population Center’s North Atlantic Population Project. His project will look
into residential clustering and segregation but would also ―have addition impacts as other
social scientists take advantage of the computerized map files‖ (Logan 2010). From this
dataset, spatial historians will be able to further the developments of methods relating to
population variables.
Traditional examples of the American walking city
Interest in the walking city has increased in the past decade due to environmental and
economic efficiency discussions and the historical walking city continues to be
mentioned in urban planning articles (Newman 2009, Kenworthy 2009) Literature has
not produced the kind of discussions needed to understand the historical development of
its form. In the past, urban literature has often focused on Boston, Manhattan,
Charleston and Philadelphia as representing the classic walking city. While these cities
represent the most culturally and economically important American cities of their time,
they are not a representative sample of the variety of present day urban spaces and

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metropolitan regions whose histories predate streetcars and steam ferries. If these cities
are to represent a model, they would need to share standard elements such as: similar
topographies which are surrounded by water and swamp, histories as mercantilist port
towns with limited space and a disproportionate number of merchants, traders and
financiers, and finally all share equal economic stagnation following the American
Revolution. The following section will briefly analyze three of the largest 18th
century
American pedestrian cities, New York, NY, Boston, MA, and Philadelphia, PA observing
the placements of occupations in relation to topography, land use and physical urban
infrastructure. In doing so, we can observe the generalized differences in mercantilist
cities and how this compares later to Minneapolis.

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Map 2. Occupational Stratification in 1791 Manhattan using Mean Center

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Map 3: Boston 1800 City Directory/Map with number of Individuals with Selected Occupations from Total
on Street level data

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Map 4: Philadelphia 1790’s City Directory/Census/Map with number of Individuals with Selected
Occupations

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Manhattan, Boston, and Philadelphia
The methodologies used in creating the three maps will be discussed later in detail in the
second chapter. However, the following is a quick overview of how the maps are made.
The data used in the maps include address-rich census and city directory data,
contemporary map(s) used to define historical street names, and the a modified TIGER
2000 line file altered to historical street names and ranges. The maps represent addresses
for New York and Philadelphia, while the Boston data was aggregated to the street name
level. The Boston map uses a ―table join‖ of the address name in both the street polygons
and the city directory. The number of residents with a selected occupation is then divided
by the total to produce a percent. New York and Philadelphia is derived from an ArcGIS
tool called address match using a modified TIGER 2000 (becoming a TIGER 1791) and
the 1791 city directory. This tool is the interpolated placement of the address along a
street line segment. The results of number of the addresses matched depend on either the
number of cases missing essential data or the amount of time place into tracking informal
addresses or streets missing from the map. There are a number of both scenarios for New
York and Philadelphia. The percent matched for Boston using the join technique was
91% for 1789 and 96% for 1800. Meanwhile the percent of total for New York 1791 and
Philadelphia 1790 using the address matching technique was 79% and 83% respectively.
The address points from New York and Philadelphia are then used to calculate the mean
center of each of the three occupations selected.
From the three cities, the results show no standard use of peripheral property and the
distribution appears to be clustered in many areas of the cities along high and low status
occupations. There are neighborhoods which lack any high status occupation residents,

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likewise, areas where there were very few low-status occupations. Additionally, at the
earliest point in U.S. urban history, residences were not based on center-periphery
relationships, but on complex land use relationships that likely are influenced most by
topography, the cities dominant industrial classification, and the degree in which the city
is developed at the time of analysis (the earlier the road and building infrastructure is
created, the greater the cost of altering it). New York and Boston have nearly identical
economic function and topography although they represent an example of greater (1790
New York 33,000) and smaller (1790 Boston 17,700) scales both physically and
economically. Even with the many similarities, the two cities’ land uses looks very
different. Laborers resided far from wharfs in New York (nearer the ship yard), yet
nearest the wharves in Boston (with the exception of the Long Wharf). We also notice
high-status residential developments near the base of the Boston Map in the back water
which was backfilled later in the 1800’s as seen on the later Boston map (Map 7). This
southern section of Boston resembles the approximate peripheral area in New York,
which is completely occupied by laborers, washwomen and other low-status occupations.
The similarities for the two cities are that merchants cluster near high profile wharfs,
lawyers near the county or city courts, and laborers are not found near these places.
The topographic variations from New York and Boston’s island/ peninsula cities become
more profound in comparison to the historical river borne cities. Topographical pressures
cause by the use of industry on the river would seemingly affect the residential patterns,
causing early laborers to settle at the center near the river and their industry, while the
wealthy would reside out on the periphery. Considering the changes during the first
century of the United States among top twenty urban spaces, river borne cities grew in

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their representation of the group’s total population from 3.8 percent in 1790 to 14.26
percent in 1880 (Gibson 1998). Theoretically, the increase in the share of river city
residents compared to the total urban population could impact the number of laborers
residing in the center of the city. Unfortunately, there is no literature which classifies
cities in this manner. Although Philadelphia, PA was a mercantilist port city it is the best
example of a river city from the 18th
century.
Philadelphia
The City of Philadelphia had the first defined suburbs in the United States, Both suburbs,
Northern Liberties and Southwark, ranked in the top ten populated urban places in 1790.
The city directory of 1791 claims Philadelphia and its suburbs had over 6,000 houses
(Biddle 1791: 148), and the 1790 census totals a little over 44,000 residents, including
Southwark and Northern Liberties (1790 U.S. Federal Census). Although the concept of
the two suburbs is explicitly stated in the directory’s description, the borders of the three
urban places are often undefined when enumerating north and south streets. Maps from
the period show continuous north and south development although they were distinct
places. With no break in urban development between the populated places, some
residents work in one and resided in another. Unlike Boston and Manhattan, Philadelphia
did not have natural topographic restraints on residential developments. This provides a
mercantilist city which shares the same cost/benefit restraints as many of the later river
based urban places such as Minneapolis.
It appears pressure to remain in dense residential areas for Philadelphia was a matter of
efficiency and cost of carting goods from the wharfs, as opposed to Boston and

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Manhattan whose density was enforced by water boundaries. Local shipping and the
need to restrict the development of roads is not overlooked by the city council.
Philadelphia City regulated cost/payment for carters and other forms of portage with the
two prices up to ½ mile and between ½ and 1 mile. The cost increased by approximately
75% after the first half mile. A buffer analysis placed 90% of all listed businesses within
the first ½ mile buffer. The cost for carting was the only local decree from the mayor
listed in the 1791 city directory (Biddle 1791: 168). Future research could investigate
the nearness of specific product-merchants to corresponding shipping wharfs. This might
play a role in determining the likelihood of occupational clusters occurring around
shipping corridors.
Brooklyn and defining suburbs
Kenneth T. Jackson focuses on Manhattan and Brooklyn when describing transportation
technology’s role in changing urban behavior. Both Boston and New York’s topography
dictated that during the growth process, density would increase until residences would
need to cross the river. Manhattan began as a walled city and the distance to the
northeastern swamp region was a mere 1500 meters. This meant that unless the city
wanted to pay for a costly infill project there would be pressure to settle across the river.
On the 1791 Manhattan map (Map 2), we see the residential layout in which the smallest
dots represent all residents (76% of the city directory were address matched), the green
points represent merchants and brokers, the white represent lawyers and judges, and the
laborers are blue. The mean centers provide us with a highly aggregated visualization of
where each group resides. Settlement in Brooklyn gave residents a closer distance to

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New York’s center than the land beyond the swamps, avoiding the risk of tardiness or
interaction with tougher neighborhoods in the Northern Wards. Jackson claims that
America’s first commuter suburb was Brooklyn in 1816 and follows sociologist Gideon
Sjoberg’s emphasis on technology. He links that year to the advent of steamboat ferries
and the concurrent sale of expensive plots aimed at the elites (Jackson 1985: 27).
However, Brooklyn was connected to Manhattan through ferries from the colonial period
and the small village had three merchant commuters already by 1796 based on the
Brooklyn town directory. Additionally, Jackson emphasized wealthy land purchases but
neglected a much larger population catalyst for Brooklyn, that being the 1806 grand
opening of the United States Navy shipyard and the subsequent property purchases by
lower status occupations as well as the beginning of those New York commuters who
began working out in the suburbs (Stiles 1869).

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Brooklyn, NY
Map 5: Brooklyn in 1840 as a Mixed but Occupationally Stratified Suburb

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Map five classifies occupations or industries into groups, address matches and then
presents their percent of total aggregated to the block group level (74% match rate). The
blocks groups used to spatial join the address points are the TIGER 2000 block group
polygon file. This provides a quick method of aggregating the addresses (which can
standardize any future analysis). The directory’s data is a representative sample of heads
of households for both 1823 and 1840 [1823 (directory N=1225, 1820 census HH
N=1074) and 1840 (directory N=6226, census n=36233)].
On the far left, the construction industry residences are represented. The results showed
they clustered just north of Fulton Street and Flatbush Avenue. These properties were
likely best suited for their distance to construction developments on the island
considering it was on the periphery of Brooklyn city. Considering the population
increased of an average of 3000 people per year between the years 1840-1850,
construction bids would have been constant and it appears as though the building industry
lived near their work sites. Jackson’s reference to a single sale of 600 lots in 1853 is an
example of the pressure to build in the years leading up to the civil war (ibid: 29). The
results of the center map show an occupational clustering of merchants in the block
groups on the western edge called Brooklyn Heights. Merchants residences spatially
correspond to access to Fulton Ferry, which provided these business class passengers
with a simple, one block walk to Wall Street when they disembarked on Manhattan. This
area is referenced by Jackson as an area with 26 merchants who worked in ―the city‖ in
1841 (ibid: 32). Finally, the map above represents the residences of all ship, ferry, boat
and naval related industry occupations. This block group cluster is found adjacent to the
Naval Yard. Brooklyn’s suburbanization process during the early period of urbanization

30. 30
appears to be more complicated than presented in Crabgrass Frontier. It was a suburb
for 40% or walking city for the other 60% of it residences. In any case, spatial social
stratification was established both on Manhattan Island as well in Brooklyn with
clustering occupational areas and both classes commuting via steam ferries (1840 U.S.
Census aggregate count numbers 2719 total manufacturing jobs in Brooklyn, NY).
Map 6: Visualization of Boston’s Streetcar Suburbs –Sam Bass Warner
Warner: 1978

31. 31
Map 6: Mapping the Spatial Transformation of Residential Boston using Laborers and
Lawyers 1845-1875

32. 32
Central Boston during Suburbanization
Map 6 represents Boston’s developing occupational stratified space, first as Sam Bass
Warner visualized it in his work on the suburban streetcar’s expansion into other
municipalities (Warner 1962: 63), followed by a visualization of the contemporary inner-
city movement of lawyers and laborers, as represented by using one-third samples from
the 1845, 1870 and 1875 Boston city directories (Tuft University Digital Archives 2010).
The results show lawyers clustered in central Boston in 1845 and by 1870 they were on
the edge of the fill area in the west/southwest corner. By 1875 this area became more
broadly filled in, despite the occurrence of the 1873 panic in between those two years.
Meanwhile, the laborers shows the expansion of their residences as the density of the city
increases during industrialization and the concurrent immigration. The development
pressure within limited space on a peninsula similar to Manhattan was driving the local
infilling and annexation. Lawyers and laborers both show movement into new land infill
sections as the city climbed to a population over 300,000 by 1875. Though further
research is needed, we see from the sample that streetcars show development in new
labor and lawyer dominated residential areas. This would imply that transportation
simply moved these occupational clusters outwards as population pressure increased.
This pressure to develop into the nearby wetlands, were likely brought on by several
factors. The first is the cost of razing old buildings for residential purposes. The second
was the need for a larger footprint as merchant and manufacturing businesses expanded
in size, employees, and capital. Finally the large increase in migration during this period,

33. 33
and their attempt to minimize commute distances. Although Warner’s claims that
geography and lack of technology hindered expansion, judging by the internal movement
throughout the 19th
century, the variables were more complex with economic and
population growth likely driving expansion of transportation technology (ibid: 50).
Spatial social stratification
Social stratification can be defined simply as groupings based on social classes or
hierarchies. More specifically groupings based on biological distinctions such as age,
gender or acquired social distinctions such as wealth, prestige, and power (Haug 1977:
51). Practically, it is the ability or inability for individuals and groups to pursue their
needs and wants or to command influence within the broader community. Spatial social
stratification uses space in order to insulate or to maintain social, economic, and cultural
feedback. The relationship between distance and social indexes was recognized by Robert
Park (Park 1926: 18). Park was heavily influenced the subsequent ecological approach to
spatial clustering of various elements as it related to hierarchy. Hierarchies which range
from poverty, racial, political, to behavioral based spatial clustering. Recent works within
sociology which have discussed elements of spatial social stratification which relate to
analysis addresses in Minneapolis include: Wendy Bottero and Kenneth Prandy (2003)
―Social interaction distance and stratification‖ and Elizabeth Oltmans Anat (2007) paper
―The wrong sides of the track.‖ Using elements from some of the authors mentioned
earlier, the third chapter will attempt to quantify stratification as the use of space by
various groups became more complex.

34. 34
Summary
The chapter has considered the literature which provides approaches to interpreting the
development of stratified space in Minneapolis. In what ways are other urban examples
helpful in describing the development or to dissimilar? Using urban areas for comparison
with vastly different topography, age of settlement, and economic function does not
provide a solid comparison. Likewise, relying strictly on top down historical sources
does not provide the whole picture of which direction 19th
century urban spaces were
growing. Developing more empirical sources provide a second vantage point in addition
to the traditional historical sources. It is quite clear from the data and many secondary
sources, that some authors in suburbanization studies have overrepresented or
oversimplified the upper and middle classes role in 19th
century suburbanization.
However, the data are not free from critique.

35. 35
Chapter II. Methods; Normalizing inconsistent aggregate scales in multi-source and
address-rich micro-data
Introduction
The variation between contemporary historical lists, roles or censuses as well as annually
published data, has the possibility to cause error when historians attempt to
analyze/visualize multiple cities or use the data in a time series for a single city. This
chapter explores techniques to account for these inconsistencies within and between
historical address-rich micro-datasets. Historical censuses, organizational roles, and city
directories can be difficult to use beyond their original design. This is true when place
name and address conventions are not continuous though time, have with greater or lesser
detail, or when there are variations between contemporary sources. While enumeration
errors such as rational gender and age conflicts, often occur randomly, spatial error
resulting from a ―no match‖ is more likely to be ―geographically bias‖ (Zimmerman
2008: 263). This chapter will address using standard administrative boundaries, where on
Earth ID’s, and integration when handling address matched historical census micro-data.
Additionally, the chapter will consider methods on how to represent multiple resolution
data and visualizing confidence indices of interpolation when using line segment and
polygon representations.
Technical Relevance
The Church of Latter Day Saints-volunteers and Historical Census Project have created a
complete count digital dataset for the 1880 Census, which now includes addresses for the
top 39 largest cities. Additional projects are ongoing with the goal of digitizing complete

36. 36
count censuses from 1850-1900 (There are no microdata for 1890 census. The schedules
caught fire before images were created). Although the 1880 and 1900 censuses were
enumerated to the address level, the censuses between the years 1850-1870 were not.
Using name matching and ward boundaries from corresponding city directories, it will be
possible to geocode the majority of census data for nearly all U.S. cities. Added-value
for linking the census to city directories includes work place addresses and large yearly
occupational samples. Research currently in progress using the combination of census
and city directory data include; Marc St-Hilaire’s (2010) "Cultural and Social Changes in
an Industrializing Capital: Quebec City 1851-1911"(Geography, de l'Université Laval,
Quebec.), Jeff Strickland (2008):, "Historical Geography of the Transition from Slavery
to Freedom: African-Americans and their Immigrant Neighbors in Charleston, South
Carolina, 1860-1880"(History, Montclair State University), and John Logan’s (2009)
―maps locations of residents in 39 major cities in 1880, using the full-count data of the
1880 census, a project supported by both NIH and NSF‖ (Sociology, Brown University).
Address-based historical data has increasingly been used during the past three years but a
critique has not yet been published.
Aggregating within Administrative Boundaries
Currently, the most common method of visualizing census data is through polygons,
which represent various administrative boundaries (NHGIS). Nearly all historical federal
and state censuses provide some form of spatial information as a part of the tabular data.
However, the boundaries and scales of the data can change considerably depending on
the year of enumeration or region of settlement. Boundary variations present a challenge
when analyzing districts, tracts or wards which do not align over time. These problems

37. 37
are often addressed by using areal interpolation with spatial weights to adjust for the
known spatial inconsistencies in the demographic data (Gregory and Ell 2007: 138,
Shepherd et. al. 2009) While interpolation is often the only option for aggregated
population, interpolation is appropriate for continuous data such as elevation, weather,
and soil. Population interpolation, attempts to predict people who are not continuous.
Often the demographic landscapes contain breaks, holes or have imbedded political,
economic or natural boundaries which greatly change who occupy and use the space.
While most political boundaries are widely known, other social boundaries which are
more difficult to define exist as well. Each boundary type can alter local residential
patterns. For example, a row of known houses of ill fame or mansions create breaks in
the landscape which can be washed out in aggregate data. Administratively dictated
boundaries often don’t match the researcher’s desires. Attempts to coerce inconsistent
spatial-temporal data inevitably leads to misrepresentation. Drawing on address level
data gives the researcher the ability to use both defined political boundaries as well as
more subtle boundaries which can be visualized as points or interaction with buffers.
Aaron Straup Cope, of Flikr fame, introduced a concept he calls the ―Shape of
Observation‖ in an article ―The Interpretation of Bias (and the Bias of Interpretation)‖
written for the ―Museums and the Web 2009 Conference‖ in April of 2009. Stroup Cope
(2009) attempts to map the shape of observation by first defining their geocoding
visualization within Flikr’s ―boxes‖ and then, providing the location as a more refined
user-defined location. Essentially Flikr provides a bottom up naming conventions
supplied by the owner of the image (Straup 2009). The Shape of Observation can be
applied to address rich micro-data. Enumerators and the interviewees for the census, city

38. 38
directories, or organization rolls provide a similar form of ground up spatial reference.
This requires flexibility when attempting to georeference the location and it does not fit
into standard geocoding, using TIGER line files. Unmatched locations can be placed to a
buffered street, an ―addition‖ or a traditional bounded polygon such as census
tract/enumeration district, urban place, etc. The rationale is that a certain level of
interpolation occurs within all methods of geocoding using lines, points and polygons. It
is only a matter of how much area is involved and how to classify this area when
analyzing it.
Map 8: Aggregating Address Point data to Varying Scales over Time

39. 39
Combining Address-rich Microdata and Aggregate Data
The variety of resolution within the census and directories often require combining
address-rich and aggregate data through ―spatial joins‖ The map above is an example of a
variety of spatial joins as well as aggregate data. In the case of 1940 the micro-data has
restricted access until 2012 and therefore the map’s resolution is confined to 1940 census
tract level analysis. In this case, the occupations from the 1867 city directory are spatially
joined to the 1940 tract polygons in order to compare the percent of laborers within a
given area.
Likewise when the ability to accurately place addresses at a finer resolution exists, a
spatial join can be performed on data to better represent nuances which would be lost
when administrative spatial units or point data is used. Depending on how the data is
used, the address-level is not always the best resolution to analyze and visualize
microdata. However, because it is the smallest resolution captured in both census and
city directory data, it can be spatially joined to polygons such as buffers and various
levels and time period’s administrative boundaries.
Inconsistency in Variable Enumerations
The decennial census is designed for the present and the future, often without concern for
how the new census relates to the past censuses. This creates analytical difficulties for
historians when comparing censuses over time. For example the citizenship variable is
included in 1870 and 1890, is dropped in 1880. Censuses became more complex as the
nation’s economy became stronger and more diverse. The censuses from 1790 until 1840
are aggregated to the head of household with tick marks or counts for other variables.

40. 40
Minnesota Territorial and State Censuses for the years 1857 and 1885 provided details
about occupation during those prosperous times, but the censuses enumerated during the
troubled times following the war and the panic of 1873 (1865 and 1875) contain
considerably fewer variables. Likewise, depending on the decennial census, spatial data
can also vary in its form as the nation adds, subtracts or alters the various boundaries
(such as states, counties, enumeration districts, cities or places, census tracts, city wards,
blockgroups, blocks, informal descriptions, streets, and addresses).
Meanwhile city directories were written to provide residents, visitors and businesses,
with a way of finding individuals, services and goods in the city. These documents
changed as the complexity of the society changed as well. While most city directories are
quite similar, there was no official oversight or standardization. This has led to city
directories with variations in race reporting, occupations, and workplace listed. While
variables included in the city directory vary, they rarely exclude occupation. However,
there are temporal changes in classification of many occupations. As cities transitioned
from mercantilist, to industrial, and to service-based cities, many of their occupations
either ceased to exist or changed their meanings.
City directories may have place-specific issues which are not supposed to exist in the
Federal Census (Variations in census enumeration surely exists in all periods.
Philadelphia has occupational and street level information for 1790 when no other cities
have that level of detail). It was in the interest of the directory to attempt to enumerate
everyone within the city. However, the budgets in which the publishers operated, varied

41. 41
from city to city. Depending on the time of the year and how long the directory took to
enumerate, could impact the number of individuals included. The impact of season could
affect areas with seasonal labor. Although a more minor problem, in some cases the
same people could be enumerated twice because they moved during the period the
directory was being produced. There are other issues related to occupation. In the case
of Minneapolis in 1859, 1880 and 1881, there is no record of female domestic servants
while they are listed in 1867. Generally, up to the 1880s there were very few females.
When they were listed, they often consisted mainly of widows and misses. The
participation rates of our sample cities increased over time. While Boston’s 1789 and
New York’s 1791 city directory were 40% and 60% of the 1790 Census heads of
household. Minneapolis’ 1880 city directory occupations are approximately 95% of the
U.S. Census’.
Data Quality and Inconsistency in Address data
Geocoding historical address data is most often based on TIGER/census line files. An
accurate recreation of a historical road network relies on having a normal or even
distribution of modern road network intersections, which have remained undisturbed
from the period of the study. The better the distribution of shared intersection, the lower
the root mean standard error (RMSE) when rubber-sheeting (stretching the map to
georeferenced anchor points) the historical map. This affects the final historical roads
layer when the historical map is used to recreate roads which have been removed or
altered over time. Recreated roads should be georeferenced to the correct coordinates,
provided that TIGER and the surveyor and cartographer produced an accurate product.

42. 42
These mapping based methods were used by National Historical GIS to create tract
boundaries for cities between 1910 and 2000 (NHGIS). Accuracy can also be tested using
GPS ground truthing for historical building, archeological sites, or other unchanged
historical objects.
The stage of development in a town or city or of certain neighborhoods within a city,
determined whether an address would have numbers assigned to the streets.
Additionally, streets initially with numbers, could change the number order due to the
lengthening of the streets. In the 18th
century data for Manhattan and Philadelphia
changes occurred every year making it difficult to define x and y coordinates. Creating a
single street segment with its contemporary address range adds more risk for errors, if the
dwellings are not evenly distributed along that single line segment. For instance, if a
cemetery or a variation in the size of address plots existed over the length of the multi-
block, single line segment, the addresses would be interpolated further from ―true‖ than
the single block, single line segment found in modern TIGER files.
In the case of Manhattan, the recreation of the historical road network was assisted by the
representation of built space on the historical map. Even with the building
representation, addresses are derived from longer line segments making them less
accurate. Prior to the fire insurance maps of the 1870-1880’s, it is difficult to place the
dwelling in the precise location with complete certainty. Fortunately for those
researching Minneapolis, the street and numbering system from the time of settlement
remained static. Only a simple look up/crosswalk is required to adjust for name changes
over time. Instead of historical inconsistencies, Minneapolis has had an error within

43. 43
TIGER2000 range. Presently, Minneapolis has commonly ranges one through 30 or
possibly through 59 and this has been in place from before 1880. TIGER2000 created all
ranges 1-99 meaning all of the 99’s must be changed.
Coercing Historical addresses into the TIGER geocoding format
In many problem cases, the spatial data may be represented as a polygon or 2d instead of
as a linear space such as addresses derived from TIGER 2000. These 2d area spatial
references, more often than not, exist in directory and census data as out-lot names or in
informal squatter settlements. With the exception of named buildings such as
Minneapolis’ Nicollet Block, the majority areas with non-linear derived spatial references
are in areas on the periphery. Individuals residing in homes out on the periphery often
did not have a significant number of houses around them to warrant creating address
numbers. This is the case for individuals who are not address matched in Philadelphia
and Minneapolis. Following the Waldo Toblar ―first law of geography,‖ peripheral
residents will share similar attributes, and will cause clustered spatial errors if not
considered (Tobler 1970: 234-240). An example occurred as new immigrant laborers
were clustered in informal squatter parts of the city, such as in low lying flood plains or
along railroad tracks. Matching inconsistencies leading to spatial error in analysis is
addressed in Zimmerman’s (2008) article, ―Estimating the Intensity of a Spatial Point
Process from Locations Coarsened by Incomplete Geocoding.‖ Similar to the historical
out-lots of Minneapolis, Zimmerman (2008) found modern rural areas produced much
higher ―no match‖ rates due to what he calls ―selection‖ or ―geographic biased‖ areas.
These areas have a greater proportion of unmatched addresses then those areas within

44. 44
towns and cities because specific address number and names matches did not always
occur. He proposes using ―coarsened-data‖ in which the missing geocoded data is
brought up to the zip code level. In the case of historical data, the zip codes are replaced
with another known bounded area such as tracts, wards and defined additions.
Visualizing confidence weights to Philadelphia 1790-1791 and Minneapolis 1880-
1881
Zimmerman’s (2008) analysis of confidence weights can be applied towards linked
census and city directory’s ―head of household‖ for Philadelphia 1790-1791 and
Minneapolis 1880. Philadelphia and Minneapolis are chosen both for their topographical
similarities but also because they are temporal ―bookends‖ to those decennial censuses
which can most profit from address and occupational data acquired from city
directory/census linkage. While the cities represent two historical periods, namely late-
mercantilist and industrial-capitalist eras, they share similar topography, total population,
and are both pedestrian urban environments at the time of their census enumeration. The
results will show, that through confidence spatial weights, ranging from 0.1-1.0, multi-
scaled historical urban micro-data can be analyzed and visualized in a manner that
preserve the valuable spatial elements which exists. Historical enumerators gave
approximations when numbered address did not exist. Using addresses and polygon
centroids can both represent an analytical and visual ―place‖ but with lesser and great
spatial confidence (Liu et. al.2010).

45. 45
Map10: Mapping Error in Philadelphia 1790- 1791

46. 46
Address Matching
The city of Philadelphia provides a lone example from the 1790 U.S. census in which
street names and side of streets are provided (with the exception of the Northern District
which is 876 of the 5131 total cases). Philadelphia was also the only city in which
occupational information were enumerated. Additional sources such as the city
directories from 1791 and maps from 1794 and 1796 provide more specific address
placement when the census and city directory are linked. The map of Philadelphia (Map
10) containing ―Free Black Head of Households‖ and ―Households with Slaves‖ offers a
visual of the inconsistency which occurs when attempting to standardize addresses from
documents with inconsistent spatial scales or resolution.
Address matching historical census data varies from cleaning and address matching
modern data. Historical address matching may require acquiring information from
multiple sources and more interpolation. In the case of the Map 10, the known values are
created with varying degrees of resolution. The historical base maps (1794/1796 maps)
are georeferenced to TIGER 2000 roads layer. The maps and road layers are aligned
based, first on altering the map to represent the coordinates in the roads layer, then
adding/editing missing or altered roads. The method uses centerline corners from TIGER
2000 to match the corresponding historical map intersections provide anchor points for
those unchanged corners. From those anchor points the rest of the map is ―rubber-
sheeted‖ or stretched to the present day coordinates. When the missing road line
segments are created for streets that have been removed over time, focus is turned to
editing the address ranges of the roads layer.

47. 47
The address range for the roads layer for 1790-91 Philadelphia is completely different
from those in 2000 Philadelphia. Depending on the street, addresses are sometimes
different for each year the city directory was produce. House addresses appear to be
literal counts of the number of total addresses on a street. When a new address is added,
all of the previous addresses changed. This creates a unique problem for representing
1790 addresses spatially or temporally. Resolving this problem draws from the available
sources and then alters the line segments to best represent that information. Although the
maps were created between four to six years after the census, the symbols for the built up
area provide one clue as to how many blocks are included in those addresses with
numbers for the Northern District. This visual information is supported by the 1791
directory, in that addresses outside of the numeric range were represented as ―between‖,
―corner‖, or ―above‖ the two or more street names. For example the city directory will
write, Market Street between 7th
street and 8th
street. This is probably because of the low
number of dwellings on the street made it less useful to add a number. In the Middle and
Southern Districts, the range was provided in the census. When no other clues are
provided, a single line segment is created with the same coordinates as TIGER 2000
using the city directories entire range. These ranges can be split when landmarks exist on
the historical maps and are also listed as an address in the city directory. In these cases,
the landmark becomes a breaking point for the line segment. For example, the full range
of Cherry Street is 1-90. However, Cherry Street has a Dutch church at 22 Cherry St. and
a burial ground listed at 30 Cherry St. Likewise the line segments using the maps symbol

48. 48
for the church and cemetery are used to start and stop new line segments. This would
create a new range of 2-22, 24-30, and 32-90 for the south side of the street.
Inherent in this new ―TIGER 1796‖ exists possible errors which can include: positional
uncertainty inherited from TIGER 2000; thematic errors in the original map; temporal
inconsistency incurred from using data from 1790, 1791, 1794, 1796; contemporary
tabular errors or incompleteness in the 1790 census; as well as lineage error during the
enumeration and transcription of this data over the past 220 years (Chrisman 1998). In
many cases, these problems can be logically defined, quantified and/or represented in or
with the final coordinates. Although there is currently no individual confidence weight,
the confidence in how or where the point was derived can and should be visually defined.
Philadelphia’s U.S. Census and city directory provide the best case scenario for how
urban occupations clustered in the late 18th
century. However, if this research is expanded
to include data with less resolution from other cities in 1790, such as New York or
Boston, it will require developing statistical methods for applying spatial confidence
weighting beyond simple visual categories.

49. 49
Categorizing Variation in Address Confidence
Line Segments Confidence Households % HH of Total
Undefined 0 122 0.024
7-8 Blocks 0.6 295 0.057
5-6 Blocks 0.7 936 0.182
3-4 Blocks 0.8 751 0.146
2 Blocks 0.9 1245 0.242
1 Block 1 1787 0.348
Total
Households 5136 1
Confidence Measures
Now that the method of address matching had been defined, it becomes clear that not all
addresses are positioned with complete confidence. The variation in confidence depends
on the resolution of the data. In the case of using Philadelphia 1790 census, TIGER and
the historical maps without the city directory, there is confidence in the positional
accuracy in at least one of the two dimensions (linear). In other words, the enumerator
provided the street or alley and side of street creating an x and y coordinate which will
fall somewhere on a line (or at ten meters off the road) with very high confidence if it can
be determined the individuals are in order. By linking the census to the city directory we
provide an increase in the confidence by reinforcing the order of enumeration (for 4586
of the 5136 or 89% cases in Philadelphia city proper). For streets and alleys with one or
two blocks, the confidence in accuracy nearly equal to modern TIGER2000 standards.
For much of the remaining 11% in which the city directory does not provide a numeric
address, the placement of the addresses rely on reason. With each rationale there is a
levels of confidence, since the data is not explicitly written, but implicitly derived. In
most cases in which there is no city directory linkage, a rational assumption that the

50. 50
missing address can be filled in by using the census order of enumeration based on the
surrounding neighbor’s city directory.
In some case within the Northern District, no street information was provided in the
census. In these cases the city directory linkage provide the street name and address
numbers in order to place those listed in both the city directory and census. Individuals
who are listed in the census but not the city directory rely exclusively on the order of
enumeration for specific address placement. In both cases where the address number is
not explicitly stated, there is room for a small measure of uncertainty. Each example
assumes the family is residing in the next available address number when the family
could share a dwelling and the next dwelling is empty. For the Northern District, it is
assumed that the family is not a straggling household from another block. While there
are no examples of this in the other two other districts and the household is most likely in
the correct order, there is not complete certainty.

51. 51
Confidence in Address Range
(Adapted from Chapman et.al. 2003: 363)
The diagram above represents three types of confidence regions which account for spatial
resolution variations found in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston for the 1790 census.
The figure ―a)‖ represents the address confidence within a normal single segment
TIGER2000 road layer with address range included. The figure ―b)‖ represent segments
without known address numbers or if there is a known range for the entire road, the
number breaks missing for merged segments between the known intersections. Figure
―c)‖ represents the case in which individuals are known to live on a street name, but no
further information is provided.

52. 52
Returning to the Philadelphia Free Heads of Households map, the confidence in the
address or the geographical placement of the data has been quantified on a scale of 0-1.
This probabilistic uncertainty model is taken from Fepke et. al (2009), in which he
defines a variety of inputs that in turn, result in a scale of degrees of certainty.
Likewise for Philadelphia, each variable of uncertainty is graded for its area of
probability. In the case of objects on the digitized map there is approximately an average
10 meter variation between intersections on historical Philadelphia map and TIGER2000.
However the range of road segments within our ―TIGER1796‖ range from 10 meters to
1759 meters. This range does not completely define the confidence because the
addresses listed in the first 10 meters will have more confidence than those listed at the
end of the 1800 meters. Likewise, for each address listed, a percent of the 1800 meters is
divided again, provided there are not irregularities such as ―back‖ addresses or open
fields such as grave yards.
(Fepke et. al.2009: 107)

53. 53
The principles discussed in Fepke et. al (2009) are slightly altered to fit the Philadelphia
1790 data. Philadelphia point data is derived from flaws in the centerline data and is not
a flawed second source which comes from a GPS or mile post in the Fepke model. Our
points will fall within a linear buffered area and the second dimension derived from the
original TIGER center lines are accepted as ―true.‖ Physically edited centerlines however
will carry the error transferred to the map during the georeference process. Quantifying
this error can come from the Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) produced in the process
of creating control points while digitizing or from taking a sample of control points which
measure the TIGER center lines to the georeferenced historical map. In either case, the
variations in the x,y coordinates are joined polygons created by kriging (Kriging is a
spatial statistical function which uses known points to interpolate the remainder of the
study area most effectively used with continuous data such as mining, elevation, and
weather) the sample control points. This number can then be used as one of the variables
in determining confidence in the placement of address matched data.
In the case of Philadelphia data buffers are made only to visualize the confidence in
points that fall on a street. While the confidence in the map is defined as the number of
segments merged, more research is needed to determine statistical confidence. This
equation would need to consider the length in meters, the number of address, and the
impact of order on the distribution. Included in the visualization is the mean center of
―households with slaves‖ and ―free black heads of household.‖ With further research, a
mathematical formula should be able to use these probability weights in order to provide

54. 54
a confidence range for the mean center or any other spatial-statistical analysis. The
buffers produced on the map are theoretical representations of the mean center, derived
from addresses at 30-180 meter confidence zones. The colors match the zone; green
being the highest confidence in the data’s placement and white being the least confident.
In a formula, the shape of these zones could represent the weight of individuals from both
high as well as low confidence zones. In such a case, the resulting polygon would not be
circular but oblong.
The confidence or probability should also exist for addresses which are defined in
polygon regions such as neighborhoods. Just north of the Northern District of
Philadelphia is a neighborhood within Northern Liberties, called Spring Gardens. Spring
Gardens contained 75 Head of Households (348 people) on 75,000 square meters (18.5
acres), and was historically defined by the number of people occupied as butchers (28 of
75). If these cases are dropped, the spatial data would be skewed to not represent the
high cluster of butcher residents. The more accurate choice would be to represent these
residents as a single centroid and quantify the bounded area with a confidence score.

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Map 11: Distribution of Missing Cases for Minneapolis 1880 U.S. Census.
The 1880 census was the first census to prioritize address enumeration. However,
enumerators provided a variety of address scales from sub-division names, landmarks,
street names, to full addresses. Minneapolis has its share of non-standardized addresses.
These addresses often cluster in areas of new land development. In order to accurately
analyze the history of urban sprawl, this data would better serve as confidence weighted
centroids then to be dropped from the dataset. Similar to 1790, these land developments

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share both clusters of non-standardized addresses. They also share occupational and
demographic variables. Similar to Philadelphia, there is a need to maintain accountability
for any dissimilarity in spatial resolution. Unlike the older Philadelphia, Minneapolis had
fewer changes to its address numbering system between 1880 and 2010. Considering
1880 was the advent of the individual-level address variable, it is not surprising that there
were missing attributes. These are essential to address matching, however, some of these
missing attributes can be derived from historical records. Addresses which have no
numbers, or are missing avenue, street, or direction, are from common tabular error for
Minneapolis in 1880. One method for dealing these errors is using the Enumeration
District to determine parts of the missing address strings. The second method is to link
the city directory from the same year when the two documents are the same. Map 11
does not consider variations within the GIS data but does address problems found in
census enumeration. The map represents only missed cases with a defined street, but no
number, are represented. Similar to the Spring Garden example from Philadelphia, a
polygon can represent an area called ―lower levee‖ address on the east and western shores
of the Mississippi, as well as an occasional use of a business block or subdivision in place
of an address.
Summary
Address data is the lowest level of aggregation used by the Census Bureau since 1880
and with city directory linkage can be for the years 1790-1870. However, these data can
have inconsistency due to the lack of standardization over time. It is then compounded
by difficulty with errors with essential elements of the address string such as a missing or

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misplaced ―avenue or street‖. The earlier the source is, the fewer variables there are to
support location, which results in lower confidence for earlier historical census spatial
data. This chapter has covered the two data sets, Philadelphia 1790 and Minneapolis
1880. In order to define the various aggregations that occur, when addresses were
enumerated, they were either incomplete, not listed as on a street or are simply missing.
The chapter has covered handling inconsistent data brought on through applying a variety
of processing steps, both in creating the historical document and processing within the
GIS. Even as imperfect data resolution variation should be defined as confidence
indices., either as concentric probability, or confidence zones, (as in the Philadelphia and
Minneapolis maps) or as simple cells defining the affected area. While the visualization
of this method is straight forward, the formula and script for use as a spatial analysis tool
needs more work.

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Chapter III. Minneapolis Spatial Social Stratification within a “Walking City”
Introduction
The relative term ―terra incognita‖ mentioned by Homer Hoyt (1939) while describing
historical cities, have led urban historians and planners to idealize pedestrian cities.
Literature covering 19th
century American cities which have been chosen to represent the
period prior to the development of mass transportation, do not provide adequate examples
to account for the variations in topography, function, period, age, or regional differences.
This chapter analyzes the developments of social stratification in Minneapolis (as well as
St. Anthony), from the period of its initial settlement through the advent of its first
suburban streetcar system (1849-1881). It employs geospatial methods to analyze and
visualize the spatial relationships between socio-economic groupings using quantitative
sources such as individual level, address-rich census and city directory data. The chapter
begins during the period when the city was first platted, as individuals vied to maximize
their property value, and continues as Minneapolis evolved from a ―suburb‖ into a city,
and concludes during the earliest years of local investor Thomas Lowry’s- Calhoun
streetcar route. This route left the city limits for an exclusively wealthy area by a chain
of lakes in a similar fashion to the street car system described by Sam Bass Warner in
Boston. However, unlike Boston, the steam streetcar venture was largely unsuccessful
until after the period covered (Olson 1876).

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Map 12: Plat marketing to establish city plot properties; Stevens and Cheever
Above are two of the three original platted maps (Steele/Russell’s St. Anthony map being the third). The
map on the left was Steven’s 1854 plat map of Minneapolis and on the right was William A. Cheever’s
1848 attempt to win St. Anthony from Franklin Steele’s settlement. The area became informally known for
many years as ―Cheever’s Town‖ and later became the University of Minnesota. (Christmas 1854,
Brunson 1849)
North American Land Bounty Tradition
While the lands in what was to become Minneapolis were not legally set aside for veteran
soldiers or officers, the tradition in North America of using land as an incentive and good
lands as reinforcing powerful social networks, finds its roots as early as the French and
Indian War. With the lack of capital, colonial governments, the Crown and the
Continental Congress all offered land incentives as recruitment techniques, yet after the
wars’ end these promises were often reneged or apprehensively fulfilled. Still hopeful of
the crown’s promise of western lands from 1763, Major George Washington employed
an agent William Crawford in 1769 to secure the best lands in secret under the guise of
hunting game. He was said to be competing with a rival speculator and squatters. The
Ohio lands were never handed over to soldiers and officers, resulting in much
complaining (Hutchinson 1979; 3). A little over a decade later, the Continental Congress

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passed the Bounty-Land Act in September 12, 1776. Again, by the war’s end, these
promises were mired in political wrangling between regions. All land was not equal, so
when the United States finally made good on its promise land granting, the areas most
likely to become urban and industrial sites along rivers went first to military officers.
Land speculation among military officers produced many of America’s first western
landowning elite, often acquiring prime real estate through personal networks. Two ―Old
Northwest‖ examples which occurred prior to the development of Minneapolis came
from Cincinnati and Detroit. Col. John Cleves Symmes purchased the land surrounding
future Cincinnati and Dayton Ohio for $.67 per acre well under the legal price. This
purchase was known as the ―Symmes Purchase‖ which was an attempt by the
government to settle congressional debts to Symmes accrued during the Revolutionary
War (Wade 1968; 22, 23). Later, Lewis Cass of Detroit leveraged his position as a
general in the War of 1812 to become the first Michigan Territorial Governor, acquiring
prime real estate in Detroit along the Detroit River. He sold this prime real estate called
―Cass Farm‖ four years after leaving his position as Governor for $100,000 (Burton
1991; 29-32). Over the next 25 years his land holding continue to grow into a quarter of
a million dollars in Michigan real estate by 1844, and 1.2 million dollars by his
retirement in 1860 (McCoy 1991; 177, 184).
Plotting Plats (1838-1855)
By 1849, while the eastern industrial cities of Manhattan, Boston, and Philadelphia were
shoe-horning immigrant workers into their 18th
century mercantile urban infrastructures,
far out west in the newly formed Minnesota Territory, a small group of Ft. Snelling

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veterans set out to bend the landscape around St. Anthony Falls into a western Lowell,
Massachusetts (Express 1853). Unlike Eastern urban industrialists, who often were
required to negotiate complicated and entrenched political and physical urban
infrastructures in order to meet their corporate goals, out in St. Anthony and Minneapolis
a simple acquaintance could make the difference between whether a preemptor was
evicted as unwanted squatter or a ―founding father‖ of a future metropolitan area. These
early relationships led to preemptive access to profitable land, which then formed
political influence to shape the social and physical urban environment into spatial
feedback loops, which would guarantee continued success and growth for these
individual’s interests. In the case of Minneapolis, the impact on the future of stratified
space began from the earliest settlement.
The first decision to impact the city’s spatial social stratification came in 1840 when
around 157 squatters, mostly French Canadian, Irish and Swiss, were evicted from Ft.
Snelling Military Reservation ( Bloomington, Richfield, and Minneapolis). A number
from this group migrated down the river to what is today St. Paul. Within a little over a
decade, the reservation was again filled with squatters, but this time nearly all of the
preemptors were friends and associates of the signing commandant at Ft. Snelling. The
following are three individuals from the fort, two being quite influential and one more
curious, who all used their relationship to the fort to attain spatial positioning in what was
to become the most profitable central business district property.
Franklin Steele
Ft. Snelling’s sutler (government contractor or store owner), Franklin Steele, seemed to
have a strong social network both before and during his time in the Minneapolis area.

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His father was General James Steele (Inspector General of Pennsylvania during the War
of 1812), a Pennsylvania State Representative (1809-1810) and a flour and cotton mill
owner. Franklin met with President Andrew Jackson who personally advised him to go
west (Hanson 1918: 194). Another source stated that he also knew the future president,
James Buchanan, from the time when Franklin worked at the Lancaster Post Office (Neill
and Fletcher 1881: 635). It is likely Buchanan (like Franklin’s father, was also
Pennsylvania State Representative but several years later, 1814–1816) from Lancaster,
PA, knew of Franklin’s father before he ever met Franklin. Shortly after arriving, Steele
became brother-in-law to Henry Hasting Sibley, the representative of the American Fur
Trading Company in Minnesota and future Governor of Minnesota. His wife’s sister was
married to the Commandant of Fort Snelling. The American Fur Trading Company was
the main reason for the Fort being built, due to the former influence of British and
Canadian Fur trade within American Territory (Prucha 1953: 4, 9, 17-20, Folwell 1956:
7). While the full extent of the Steele’s family’s social network has not been researched,
the 24 year-old Franklin completed two pre-emptive manufacturing ―coups‖ in less than a
year, the first at St. Croix Falls and the second at St. Anthony falls (Neill and Fletcher
1881: 112). In each case, he was able to secure Boston capital to get production going.
Before his time in Minnesota ended, he purchased Fort Snelling from the Buchanan War
Department only to rent it back to the Federal Government during the Civil War. The
potential of the largest drop in elevation on the largest river in North America was well
known, so the ability of Steele to secure political and economic connections in order to
take it from seemingly more powerful people, calls for more research into these
networks.

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Col. Stevens
Similar to Steele, Col. Stevens likely received ―insider‖ information from his powerful
networks. Stevens was bound to preempt land in Texas after the Mexican-American War
but changed direction when Wisconsin Territorial Governor John Catlin strongly urged
him to settle in Minnesota (Stevens 1890: 2). A business friend from Mineral Point
Wisconsin and the future Lieutenant Governor of the State of Wisconsin, Timothy Burns,
also wrote him a letter advising him to go to Minnesota Territory (ibid: 3). The earliest
continuous transportation infrastructure was found in the Stevens’ ferry at St. Anthony
Falls. However, the unassuming role of ferry-farm served Stevens for both a lesser and a
greater purpose. The first was fulfill the contract to ferry Ft. Snelling troops across the
Mississippi in order to bring the soldiers from Ft. Snelling to Ft. Ripley [then Ft. Gaines]
and the second was to provide a 160 acres of prime western property at the Falls for Col.
John Stevens, which remained legally off limits to others until 1854 (ibid: 2)
John (Cap) Tapper
The ferry business was rowed by ferryman and former Ft. Snelling mule skinner, John
(Cap) Tapper. The English immigrant and Mexican War Veteran, Tapper provided
personal transportation for Ft. Snelling’s sutler Franklin Steele, Steele’s bookkeeper Col.
John Stevens, and Steele’s clerk R. P. Russell as well as fulfilling his proper role of
ferrying the troops when needed. From Tapper’s ferryboat in 1850, he could hear the
sounds of saws and hammers, as two-dozen carpenters struggled in St. Anthony with
sappy fresh cut green wood, as they attempted to solve the first housing crisis facing the
small village of 656 souls (1850 Federal U. S. Census). Five years later, Tapper became
the Mississippi River’s first bridge tollbooth operator, thanks to local promoters and

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former Ft. Snelling coworkers Steele, Stevens and Henry Rice of St. Paul (Wills 2005:
64) During the summer of 1862, from his perch, he watched the Minnesota and Pacific
Railroad bring the first locomotive into St. Anthony, funded by fresh war contracts.
Although Tapper migrated to Iowa to be a farmer later during the Civil War, he returned
to Minneapolis by 1905, as an 85 year old man, witnessing a city, both at its industrial
infancy and at its full maturation (1905 Minnesota State Census). The simple
muleskinner’s networks at Ft. Snelling landed him at the physical center of Minneapolis’
early settlement and by 1860, the ferryman and tollbooth operator was worth $15,000 in
combined assets (1860 U. S. Federal Census) $15,000 put this tollbooth operator in 26th
place out of 881 reported real estate holders in Minneapolis and St. Anthony in 1860. He
shared this rank with among others, lawyer W.D. Washburn of was the then, Minneapolis
Mill Company and the founder of what was later to become General Mills Corporation.
Tapper’s occupation in Boston would not command any special attention, but as Ft.
Snelling transitioned to Minneapolis, his social network was worth its weight in gold.
St. Anthony Falls
Minneapolis during the initial period consisted of St. Anthony (city 1855, merged 1873)
and Minneapolis (town 1854, city 1867, merged 1873). Evidence for spatial stratification
in present day Minneapolis comes from interviews conducted with early settlers in 1914
by Lucy Leavenworth Wilder Morris, as well as information found within the U.S.
Federal Census (Morris1976: 33, 1850 U.S. Federal Census). Their accounts should be
viewed with consideration for the period in which the history was conveyed and the age
of those who were interviewed. Over time, their stories were likely influenced by local

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and national changes in views about race, nationalism, and collective community
experience which occurred between the [event] early city development and the interview.
The housing situation in 1850 generally consisted of family homes having a small
number of individual boarders. There was economic pressure due to the high demand for
housing and slow output of wood from the single saw mill. The census listed 283
household heads or individuals enumerated with an occupation, of those only 44 had real
estate values.
After a new arrival settled into St. Anthony, they were presented with a few residential or
boarding alternatives. The first was to reside in someone’s home as a boarder, but there
were three other options on the day of the census enumeration in 1850: staying at the St.
Charles Hotel (which had a staff of five and was occupied by three carpenters and a
Baptist preacher), residing in the ―stranger’s house‖ (occupied by four lumbermen), or
bedding at the ―messhouse‖ or the company house belonging to Franklin Steele’s St.
Anthony Falls Water Power Company which held the largest number of lumbering
boarders at 17. This ―messhouse‖ could be considered the center of social life in St.
Anthony due to the ease in which it transformed into the local dance hall by simply
shifting the bunks to the side (ibid: 33).
In the beginning St. Anthony society appears to have had two distinguishable cultural
groups; either the overwhelmingly Maine-born, sawmill employees who generally lived
in the Russell and Mill Additions or the French-Canadians, who lived in the northeast

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side of the river in the Bottineau Additions. Pierre Bottineau was one of the largest land
owners and was a former regional trapper and former Fort Snelling guide who lived with
his Chippawa wife and five mixed-race children, as well as eight adult workers from
Canada or the Wisconsin Territory. Near Bottineau, lived a French-born brewer and
sawmill owner, John Orth. Based on the order of census enumeration, Orth was
surrounded by predominately French family names such Roche, Dechallais, Beautemps,
DuGal, Junau, and Poncin. The method of using the order of enumeration needs more
research. The topology of enumeration is not standardized. Generally, the order of
enumeration follows from house to house, but this order is broken on occasion due to
straggling households (households that are missed for one reason or another in the first
pass and counted later). While enumeration paths follow addresses in general, they may
not be predictable. Historical sources have racialized this area of early settlement calling
settlers ―half bred‖ traders, many migrating from the Red River Valley and some who
were earlier removed from the Ft. Snelling Reservation. Even though Leavenworth
Wilder Morris did not interview any of these French-Canadian or ―half breeds‖, those
Eastern pioneers provide insight into how they perceived both the Red River Valley
oxcart traders, as well as those who lived in the northeast part of the village. A local
figure, Celeb Dorr saw them as always looking more Indian than white, (ibid: 28). Many
descriptions considered them very Swarthy (ibid: 34, 102, 104), and Mrs. McMullen
would keep any cartsmen from calling on her house by tying the dog to the door latch
when they were moving by, adding she had been insulted at some point, when one called
her a cow mistaken for an ox (ibid: 37). Dr. Lysander P Foster described the Bottineau
children as half-breeds who only spoke French and also said that the town’s half-breeds

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had gardens and raised famous vegetables in the northeast. Additionally, the French and
French-Canadians made up nearly all of the more serious legal cases during the first three
years of settlement. Bartender Alexis Cloutier in 1852 and Edmund Bressette in 1853
were both brought before court for selling alcohol after the New England-Born
residence’s victorious but short-lived law creating a ―dry‖ territory (Mead and Muller
1899: 19). A year after this case (1854), there was an indictment of French-born
merchant Peter (Pierre) Poncin, who was accused of raping his servant. All of these
individuals were acquitted, but this area’s residents were the only group represented in
any indictments, outside of the most petty of misdemeanors. On the other hand, when
hotel owner and New York native, Anson Northrup was accused of an ongoing legal
infraction, the Governor of Minnesota Territory personally visited him in order to try to
work out the problem (ibid: 34).
In the more developed part of town, there were three additions which held different
social-economic functions. First, R. P. Russell’s northern addition (Steele’s clerk from
Fort Snelling who was the first merchant in St. Anthony) became the local ―Wall Street‖
(Bromley 1890: 25). The second was Steele’s original addition. When Steele hired
Maine-born millwright, Ard Godfrey in 1847 to construct and run the mill, he
inadvertently created a migration pipeline for other Maine-born lumbermen. Maine-born
residences made up one third of the total population of St. Anthony in 1850 and
continued to dominate the population of St. Anthony for nearly two decades. Finally, the
―Lower Town or ―Cheever’s Town‖ was settled by Benjamin Cheever, who was the
brother of the agent representing the Boston investors, Rantoul and Cushing’s, at Steele’s

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saw mill. This area later became the University of Minnesota and was the more exclusive
residential area of St. Anthony during our period of study.
Land Office and Bridge 1855
Minneapolis as a Suburb
After clearing out the squatters in 1839-40, the War Department issued temporary passes
through Ft. Snelling, to settle in the Military Reservation. Most of these men were former
soldiers or friends of the fort and were allowed to settle on quarter sections to farm.
While this allowed the preemptors to have a local advantage to the prime real estate, it
took a couple of years for those preemptors to persuade the federal government that they
were the rightful squatters and anyone else was illegal. By the time the land was legally
opened, the local newspaper, the St. Anthony Express, noted that the officers and the
―biggest boys‖ in the territory had taken up so much land that there was none left over for
common man (Kane 1966: 34).
Unlike Franklin Steele’s St. Anthony City, which was quickly industrializing, Col.
Steven’s Minneapolis Town/Ft. Snelling Reservation remained, a settlement in legal

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limbo until 1855. However, with such great possibilities, preemptive settlement
continued throughout the first half of the 1850’s. There was so much pressure from
unwanted squatting, that Stevens helped create a neighborhood association called
Minnesota Protection Association in 1852 later in 1853, it was called Hennepin County
Claim Association or the lengthy ―Equal Right and Impartial Protection Claim
Association of Hennepin County, M. T.‖ (Stevens, 1890: 180 and Kane 1966: 35). This
neighborhood association had no legal basis, considering they did not live in a state or
territory. Sometimes they acted with the blessings of the fort and at other times they did
not. Stevens writes,
―It was a common occurrence for a squatter to leave his place with everything all
right, and returning, after an absence of one day, to find his shanty a wreck, and
any other improvements he might have made destroyed.‖ (Neill 1881: 341).
Destruction of squatter property was not the only method of driving out people. On one
occasion, Stevens continues,
"Only in one instance was the association called upon to resort to severe
measures. In that instance a cat-o'-nine-tails well laid on the bare back of the
trespasser on a claim down toward Minnehaha, had the desired effect. No one else
attempted to interfere with or jump a claim. The offender in this instance
immediately left the territory and has never been heard from since." (Stevens
1890: 180).
By 1854, after the final threats in the local newspapers had their desired effect (though
the legality of landownership was finally ironed out in 1855) , Col. Stevens hired Mr.
Christmas, a surveyor, to lay out the city similar to a familiar city, New Orleans.
He later recalls,
―I decided to survey my ferry-farm at the Falls of St. Anthony into village
building-lots. ...Finding it impossible to withstand the constant importunities for
building-lots on the ferry-farm, and to prevent the lower portions from taking the

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lead in various enterprises that were near at hand, I determined to survey a portion
of the farm into building-lots...‖ (ibid: 232).
That same year, he and Franklin Steele promoted the first bridge to be built over the
Mississippi. The bridge was funded by a minimum $.05 fee to enter the town, unless you
were inclined to ferry or paddle yourself across. The cost of crossing the bridge
effectively restricted the development of commute-based housing to those individuals
who could either afford the cost of crossing the bridge to St. Anthony, or those
businessmen operating in newly formed Hennepin County. Additionally, Stevens jump-
started his sales on plats by giving properties to individuals he felt would best assist his
new town. After all the legality cleared up, newcomers interested in purchasing land
would be greeted by two structures after they flipped their nickel to ―Cap‖ Tapper on the
toll bridge. To the left of the bridge was Col. Stevens’ house and to the right was Snyder
and McFarlane’s Land Office. The land office seen in the image above is a more rustic
version of the modern mobile-home office that is prevalent in developing many sub-
divisions today (Bromley1890: 50). Stevens and his early neighbors benefited
economically from the real estate boom 1855, but with people- came crime.
Stevens lamented,
"Up to this time (1855) we had been proud of our record; but
Minneapolis was no longer an infant, and it could not expect
to retain its innocence and purity when we could no longer
select the persons we wished to have make homes with us." (Stevens 1890: 269).
Map 13: Additions developed from 1855-1861

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The boom between 1854 and statehood in 1858, inspired wide spread land speculation.
The 1861 map of Minneapolis (Map 13) shows the extent of the residential expansion of
Minneapolis and St. Anthony as drawn during the third year of depression. The white
points represent residential houses from the 1861 map and the green represents the
residents from the 1867 city directory (98% address matches). Between 1861 and 1867
residential housing appears to stagnate and reduce in many areas. These additions added
in the late 1850’s did not begin to fill until after local flour milling brought national
manufacturing prominence in the late 1880’s. Note the placement of Steele’s ―Mill

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Company’s Addition‖, R. P. Russell’s ―Russell’s addition and Steven’s ―Minneapolis.‖
All used their social network with the Fort’s Commander to successfully transition from
pre-emptive settlements, to lucrative riparian land rights and further profits from platting
the high-value land.
By 1860, there was a predominance of laborers in the northeast and the development of a
suburban-like new town called Minneapolis. During this period, Minneapolis shows
similarities to modern suburbs in several ways. St. Anthony was an incorporated city by
1860 while Minneapolis was just shy of the same size, yet when we observe the
demographic results from the 1860 Federal Census complete count micro-data aggregated
to the ward level, the data shows different types of settlements. With a near 50% gender
ratio on the Minneapolis side of the river and nearly no laborers, showed a lack of
industry and larger businesses with male employees, and based on the 1861 map of local
structures, a large out growth with nearly no center city.