Upper Post preservation underway

By Dan Ott, Ph.D., Cultural Resource Program Manager, Mississippi National River and Recreation Area

Upper Post. Copyright National Park Service 2016.

After nearly 50 years of neglect and relative quiet, the Fort Snelling Upper Post is a very different place these days. Bustling with trades workers, excavators, dump trucks, cherry pickers, and other heavy machinery, a massive rehabilitation effort to preserve this National Historic Landmark got underway in June after decades of effort to find a new use for the retired military base. The long-awaited Upper Post Flats project will repurpose the 26 remaining historic buildings at the Upper Post into 206 housing units, while revitalizing and beautifying the Upper Post’s overgrown landscape. When complete, the site will include walking trails and signs that interpret the significance of the Upper Post in U.S. and Native American history.

The Band Barracks is one of 26 buildings that are being rehabilitated for low-income housing as part of the project. It has been largely abandoned since the 1970s. Copyright National Park Service 2016.

As a physical artifact of the river’s connection to the larger strokes of national history, Fort Snelling is one the national park’s significant cultural resources. The Fort is connected to the period of American expansion and mobilization for major wars including the Civil War, Spanish-American War, and both World Wars. The Fort is also an artifact of Indigenous dispossession as a base of military operations placed at the center of Dakota homelands. The Fort played a significant role in solidifying U.S. relationships with Dakota and Ojibwe nations, treaty-making, and eventually the forced exile of all but a few Dakota, following the Dakota War of 1862.

While many people know of the rebuilt 1820s walled-fort operated by the Minnesota Historical Society since the 1960s, it is lesser known that the Fort became quite a bit larger around the turn of the twentieth century with the creation of the Upper Post. The Upper Post was built in the early 1880s as a hub for the United States Army in the Upper Midwest. It included hundreds of buildings sprawling along the blufftop of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers. At one point it housed about 4,000 military personnel at a time. Decommissioned after World War II, the Upper Post has long been neglected as many of its facilities have been demolished for new development or otherwise abandoned. In 2006, the National Trust for Historic Preservation listed the Upper Post as one of its 11 Most Endangered Places.

One of the abandoned Upper Post buildings in disrepair. Copyright National Park Service 2016.

Now owned by the state of Minnesota, the Department of Natural Resources has been working with the National Park Service to plan a new life for the Upper Post since the 1990s. Entertaining a variety of proposals and navigating myriad regulatory hurdles over the years, in 2015 the DNR finally received a viable offer from Dominium, a Plymouth-based developer, to adapt the historic site’s numerous buildings into housing. After almost a half-decade of planning among the developer, DNR, NPS, and the State Historic Preservation Office to ensure that site plans would balance developer needs with preservation requirements, the project finally broke ground in June 2021. The rehabilitated Upper Post is set to open for tenants to move in and for visitors to tour the campus in September 2023.