How Gladstone got its name (and Kipling too)

Gladstone is a railroad baby. The town sprang up in 1887, when the Minneapolis, St. Paul & Sault Ste. Marie Railroad — the Soo Line — reached the shore of Little Bay de Noc and built docks where grain and ore from the west could meet ships on Lake Michigan. The new town boomed almost overnight, and it was first platted under the name Minnewasca, said to come from a Sioux word for “white water.”

The name didn’t last a year, and the reason is a good story. The Soo Line had run out of money partway through construction, and the railroad was finished with British capital. So William D. Washburn, the Minnesota businessman behind the line, urged the new town to rename itself in honor of William Ewart Gladstone — the “Grand Old Man” of British politics, four times Prime Minister of the United Kingdom — as a thank-you to the investors across the sea. The townspeople agreed, and Gladstone it has been ever since, incorporating as a village in 1887 and a city in 1889.

And Gladstone isn’t the only literary-sounding name the Soo Line left in the Upper Peninsula. The railroad also named two other stops after the famous British writer Rudyard Kipling — one called Rudyard, and one called Kipling, just up the shore from Gladstone here in Delta County. When Kipling found out, he was delighted, and wrote asking the railroad to send him photographs “of either Rudyard or Kipling or preferentially both.”