Before & After

Tornadoes don’t have names, they have dates and times. The inky spiral that drops from the sky is memorialized according to the moment it touches down and stays, cuts the power, and skitters any which way it pleases across a field or farm or town.

St. Peter’s tornado struck at 5:20 p.m. on March 29, 1998. Before that day, this place was a stately, tree-lined town on the Minnesota River, home to Gustavus Adolphus College and more than forty buildings listed on the National Register of Historic Sites.

The twister destroyed some five hundred homes and buildings; it damaged 1,700 more. Trees that shaded the streets and squares of Gustavus were uprooted, leaving the school’s blond-brick buildings suddenly exposed on the hill above town. On Minnesota Avenue, St. Peter’s main thoroughfare, the century-old courthouse lost its soaring tower. Two people died in the storm, a six-year-old boy and an eighty-five-year-old man.

The Eugene St. Julien Cox House was damaged, but has since been repaired. Cox, St. Peter’s first mayor, was said to be “affable, genial, and always daintily dressed.” From June through August, visitors can tour his 1871 home, a neo-Gothic Italianate with a tower and carved eaves. It’s a fancy, gift-wrapped package that stands out among the suburban-style homes and spindly trees that went up after the storm. St. Peter’s curious mix of architecture—Summit Avenue meets Woodbury meets early, pre-condo Stillwater—causes time and geography to shift from corner to corner.

One landmark that went unharmed was the Drugstore Pharmacy Museum. Located inside Soderlund Village Drug on South Third Street, the museum offers a look at the history of corner drugstores. Before pharmaceutical companies began manufacturing drugs, local pharmacists made them from scratch. Extracts like sage or belladonna were compounded with chemicals into tablets or capsules. The museum displays Victorian and Art Deco-style glass globes containing rich-colored liquids that once identified individual pharmacies. A druggist’s ability to mix his own color combinations demonstrated his competence. Glass cabinets display mortars and pestles, dozens of blue and beer-colored apothecary bottles, and some quackery—an earthenware jug holds Radam’s “Microbe Killer No. 1,” patented in 1886, the ingredients of which included wine and pink dye.

Today, Soderlund remains a working pharmacy with old-time amenities: Visitors can sit on red stools at the ornate 1920s-era marble-topped soda fountain and drink root beer, compliments of the drugstore.

A block from the river is Mike’s Stuff, an antique shop with a pleasant jumble of dishes, milk bottles, embroidered tea towels and aprons, and the adjoining St. Peter Woolen Mill. Bright skeins of wool are shelved around the room, a backdrop to women examining pattern books. Usually, an orange tabby naps in a chair near the cash register. Pinned to the bulletin board are notices for knitting and quilt-making classes. There are also some absorbing color photos that document St. Peter, old and new, before and after. One shot is of the woolen mill newly smashed by the tornado, its roof collapsed. Another shows the mill now, fully restored. —Julie Hessler


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