How Gladstone got its name (and Kipling too)

Gladstone had people and a shipping story before the railroad arrived. The city dates its first settlement to 1859. Its big growth spurt came in 1887, when the Minneapolis, St. Paul & Sault Ste. Marie Railroad — better known as the Soo Line — planned a rail-and-flour port terminal on Little Bay de Noc. The new town was first called Minnewasca, a name local histories usually translate as “white water.”

The name did not last. William D. Washburn, a Minnesota businessman involved with the railroad, pushed to rename the place for William Ewart Gladstone, the four-time British prime minister. The railroad had been partly funded with British capital, and the new name was meant as thanks for the development that financing helped bring. Gladstone incorporated as a city in 1889.

The British-name thread continued along the Soo Line. In the 1890s, general manager Frederick D. Underwood named two Upper Peninsula stations for his favorite author, Rudyard Kipling. One became Rudyard, near Sault Ste. Marie; the other became Kipling, just north of Gladstone. When the writer heard about them, he asked Underwood for a photograph “of either Rudyard or Kipling or preferentially both.”