St. Marys Point, MN

St. Marys Point is a small Washington County city across the mouth of Bolles Creek from Afton, on the lower St. Croix. French-Canadian families were settling here before 1837, and a first recorded land transaction followed in 1844. Lemuel Bolles built the valley's first flouring mill in 1845-46. The village was laid out again in 1857 by Alexander Cathcart and William R. Marshall, who later became Minnesota governor; a sawmill built that year burned the next. The railroad arrived in 1881, but the place later became a river-and-summer-home community. St. Mary's Point was incorporated in 1951 and became a city in 1976.