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Red Wing

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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A city and the county seat of Goodhue county, Minnesota, U.S.A., on the W. bank of the Mississippi river, near the head of Lake Pepin, about 40 m. S.E. of St Paul. Pop. (1905, state census) 814 9, 2138 being foreign-born; (1910) 9048. It is served by the Chicago Great Western and the Chicago, Milwaukee & St Paul railways. Red Wing is the seat of the Lutheran Ladies' Seminary (1894) and the Red Wing Theological Seminary (Lutheran, 1885), and in the vicinity is the State Training School for Boys and Girls, originally the Minnesota State Reform School. In the city are the Carnegie-Lawther library, a Federal building, a municipal theatre, the T. B. Sheldon Memorial Auditorium, in connexion with which is a School of Music, a Y.M.C.A. building, a City Hospital, St John's Hospital (1902) and an old ladies' home. Red Wing is an important wheat market and shipping point.

In 1695 Le Sueur built a post on Prairie Island, in the Mississippi, about 8 m. above the site of Red Wing, for the purpose, according to Charlevoix, of interposing a barrier between the warring Dakotas and Chippewas; and in 1727 Rene Boucher built on the shore of Lake Pepin a fort which, after various vicissitudes, was abandoned in 1753. An Indian village occupied the site of Red Wing probably for many years before the arrival of the first whites, two Swiss missionaries, Samuel Denton and Daniel Gavin, who maintained a mission here in 18374 6. In 1848 another mission was established by the American Board. Red Wing (named from an Indian chief) was platted in 1853 and was chartered as a city in 1857.