St. Cloud

Sister cities

• Akita

History

What is now the St. Cloud area was occupied by various Indigenous peoples for thousands of years. Voyageurs and coureurs des bois from New France first encountered the Ojibwe and Dakota through the highly profitable North American fur trade with local Native American peoples. The Minnesota Territory was organized in 1849. The St. Cloud area opened up to homesteading after the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux was signed with the Dakota people in 1851. John L. Wilson, a Yankee homesteader from Columbia, Maine, with French Huguenot ancestry and an interest in Napoleon, named the settlement St. Cloud after Saint-Cloud, the Paris suburb where Napoleon had his favorite palace. St. Cloud was a waystation on the Middle and Woods branches of the Red River Trails used by Métis traders between the Canada–U.S. border at Pembina, North Dakota, and Saint Paul, Minnesota. The cart trains often consisted of hundreds of oxcarts known as Red River carts. The Métis, bringing furs to trade for supplies to take back to their rural settlements, camped west of the city and crossed the Mississippi in St. Cloud or just to the north in Sauk Rapids. The City of St. Cloud was incorporated in 1856. It developed from three distinct settlements, known as Upper Town, Middle Town, and Lower Town, that European-American settlers established starting in 1853. Remnants of the deep ravines that separated the three are still visible today. Middle Town was settled primarily by German Catholic immigrants and migrants from eastern states, who were recruited to the region by Father Francis Xavier Pierz, a Catholic priest who also ministered as a missionary to Native Americans. Lower Town was founded by settlers from the Northern Tier of New England and the mid-Atlantic states, including former residents of…

Geography

According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has an area of ; is land and is water. The city developed on both sides of the Mississippi River. Part of the Sauk River runs along its northern edge. Just south of downtown is the 7-acre, 35-feet-deep Lake George. In 2021, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) credited decade-long city investments in stormwater filtration with reducing Lake George's phosphorus levels well below the state standard. It called Lake George one of three "success stories" in the state, and planned to remove it from a list of impaired waters. Granite bedrock quarried in the area has been estimated to be 1.7 billion years old and was exposed after several miles of rock above it eroded. The city lies on a band of modern Mississippi river sediment surrounded by land scoured several times by Wisconsin Age glaciers beginning about 35,000 years ago, ending with the Lake Superior St. Croix lobe. The later Des Moines lobe created glacial moraines and drift south and east of the city. St. Cloud lies in the warm summer humid continental climate zone (Köppen climate classification: Dfb), with warm summers and cold winters with moderate to heavy snowfall. The monthly normal daily mean temperature ranges from in January to in July. The record high temperature is . The record low temperature is . extremes 1894–present) |single line = Y |collapsed = Y |Jan record high F = 56 |Feb record high F = 59 |Mar record high F = 81 |Apr record high F = 96 |May record high F = 105 |Jun record high F = 102 |Jul record high F = 107 |Aug record high F = 105 |Sep record high F = 106 |Oct record high F = 90 |Nov record high F = 76 |Dec record high F = 63 |year record high F = 107 |Jan avg record high F = 41.9 |Feb avg record high F = 45.1 |Mar avg…

Race & ethnicity

Most-observed species

• American Crow

  Corvus brachyrhynchos C.L.Brehm, 1822 · Aves
  5,943
• Black-capped Chickadee

  Poecile atricapillus (Linnaeus, 1766) · Aves
  5,933
• Blue Jay

  Cyanocitta cristata (Linnaeus, 1758) · Aves
  5,578
• American Robin

  Turdus migratorius Linnaeus, 1766 · Aves
  4,546
• White-breasted Nuthatch

  Sitta carolinensis Latham, 1790 · Aves
  4,173
• Northern Cardinal

  Cardinalis cardinalis (Linnaeus, 1758) · Aves
  3,889
• American Goldfinch

  Spinus tristis (Linnaeus, 1758) · Aves
  3,688
• Mallard

  Anas platyrhynchos Linnaeus, 1758 · Aves
  3,619

Largest nearby schools

• TECHNICAL SENIOR HIGH
  High · SAINT CLOUD · 1,515 students · 18.5:1 ratio
• SARTELL SENIOR HIGH
  High · SARTELL · 1,349 students · 20.4:1 ratio
• APOLLO SENIOR HIGH
  High · SAINT CLOUD · 1,225 students · 15.7:1 ratio
• SARTELL MIDDLE
  Middle · SARTELL · 978 students · 15.8:1 ratio
• Riverview Intermediate School
  Elementary · SARTELL · 938 students · 16.2:1 ratio
• SOUTH JUNIOR HIGH
  Middle · SAINT CLOUD · 867 students · 22.2:1 ratio
• OAK HILL COMMUNITY ELEMENTARY
  Elementary · SAINT CLOUD · 814 students
• NORTH JUNIOR HIGH
  Middle · SAINT CLOUD · 708 students · 15.4:1 ratio