Rochester: An Urban Biography

A concise history of Rochester, featuring stories that are familiar, surprising, and sure to change the way you see the city.

Rochester, Minnesota’s third-largest city, is best known for its world-renowned medical facility, the Mayo Medical Center—yet its history and contemporary life are filled with countless other stories, people, and pivotal moments. Rochester has always been a crossroads. For centuries, Dakota and Ho-Chunk people have lived in this beautiful area around the Zumbro River. The town itself began in 1854 as a stagecoach stop for people traveling between St. Paul, Minnesota, and Dubuque, Iowa.

In this brief and engaging history, Virginia M. Wright-Peterson explores fascinating stories of the community: the area’s indigenous people; the importance of the region’s agriculture on the karst, driftless, prairie landscape; the persistent flooding of the Zumbro River; the hidden histories held in the unmarked graves of Potter’s Field; the cyclone of 1883 and the famous medical center it spawned; the emergence of an increasingly diverse community; and Destination Medical Center, a twenty-year plan to develop the area as a global destination for health care—and the largest public-private economic initiative in Minnesota’s history.

Cities, like people, are always changing, and the history of that change is the city’s biography. This book illuminates the unique character of Rochester, weaving in the stories of place, politics, and identity that continue to shape its residents’ lives.