By Tom Schroeder, Proprietor of Waldmann Brewery in Saint Paul, MN
I was reminded on Juneteenth this year of the importance of place to our comprehension of history. Since 2017, I’ve run Waldmann Brewery and Restaurant, a restored German-American lager beer saloon in the same historically-listed building in the West 7th Street neighborhood of St. Paul where Anton Waldmann operated his saloon beginning in 1857. When our guests walk through our doors, they immediately “get it”—not necessarily all the details of pioneer life, immigrant culture and architectural styling of Waldmann’s era, but certainly a strong, visceral sense that they’re in a totally unique and authentic place, literally standing in history.
Part of our mission is to tell that history, and in early February I received an email with an exciting announcement: newly discovered records place Moses Dickson, one of the most recognized leaders of the pre-Civil War Underground Railroad, living right here just a few blocks from Waldmann, for nearly a decade before the Civil War. The discovery, by Karen Sieber, an award-winning author and historian of riots and resistance, Black history and labor history, helps to fill a previous gap in the life of Dickson, who was a prominent abolitionist, writer and organizer of a massive rebellion of enslaved peoples living in Atlanta. Sieber’s research revealed that for more than a year, beginning in 1853, Dickson ran an “eating saloon” called the Nonpareil Restaurant on St. Anthony Street near Exchange—a site that now lies beneath a lane of Kellogg Boulevard opposite St. Paul’s Xcel Energy Center. Later, from 1856-9, Dickson worked as a barber in both the Winslow House on Fort Street (today’s West 7th Street, near Kellogg Boulevard), and the Fuller House in Lowertown.
Both the Winslow and Fuller Houses frequently welcomed Southern slaveowners, who often traveled up the Mississippi to Minnesota during the summer months with their enslaved servants to vacation and invest their wealth. The Dred Scott decision officially made Minnesota a slave territory, and the Fugitive Slave Act effectively marshalled our local law enforcement to the aid of slave hunters. Brave men like Dickson, as well as William Taylor (who, like Dickson, also used his barber trade as cover), Joseph Farr and other underground agents watched for, surreptitiously met and spirited away any enslaved people willing to take the risk to a variety of hiding places in the city—including the belfry of First Presbyterian Church at Kellogg and St. Peter, the hay-loft of Willoughby’s livery stable at 4th and Robert, and the home of “an old Frenchman” living 18 miles outside Saint Paul along the Stillwater Road. There they waited—sometimes for weeks—until Dickson’s agents made arrangements via Galena, Illinois, for passage to Chicago, then through the Great Lakes to Ontario.
Sieber has spent much of her public history career tracing Dickson and other prominent figures like him, and Waldmann hosted two presentations by her shortly after I received her email. In addition to raising awareness of Dickson and other courageous Black men and women like him, Sieber is pursuing National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom status for the locations where Dickson and his fellow agents lived and worked in St. Paul.
Historic markers augmented by online resources describing these sites would be wonderful, literally placing Minnesota on the map of the National Underground Railroad for the first time.
But just think how much more powerful it would be if, like Waldmann, the Nonpareil Restaurant, or Dickson’s barber shop, or the belfry of First Presbyterian still actually existed. You would feel it in your bones.