Ramsey County History – Winter 2012: “From Boom Times to the Great Depression: Two Stolpestad Men in St. Paul Real Estate, 1886–1936”

From Boom Times to the Great Depression: Two Stolpestad Men in St. Paul Real Estate, 1886–1936

Author: James A. Stolpestad

This is a story about a Norwegian immigrant, Andrew H. Stolpestad, to St. Paul in 1884 who went on to make a modest mark for himself in local real estate and unwittingly began a family real estate tradition that continues to the present day. In his time, he did not build any lasting edifice or change the skyline, although later family generations would do both. Andrew was not part of the Old Stock establishment that ruled early St. Paul or the German cohort that challenged the existing business order. Instead, he probably was a stereotypical Norwegian: unassuming, hardworking, and from a farm family; yet educated and adventurous enough to have crossed the North Atlantic three times in steam-powered sailing ships in the 1870s and ’80s. Andrew’s second son, Annar T. Stolpestad, also went into real estate in St. Paul in the early 1920s as part of his duties at the Northwestern Trust Company (later after a merger in 1929, it was known as First Trust Company of St. Paul). In that position, he worked closely with Louis W. Hill, the second son of James J. Hill, on several of Hill’s real estate deals. Annar’s early death in 1937 ended the direct line of Stolpestad men in the field of real estate, but, today, men from the fourth and fifth generations of descendants of Andrew and Annar and their families are once more in the field of real estate.
PDF of Stolpestad article