Columbia Heights
Near Minneapolis St Paul, Minnesota
Columbia Heights got its name from a contest. In eighteen ninety-two, the development company promoting this high ground northeast of Minneapolis held a naming competition. More than two thousand names poured in. The winner, Columbia Heights, earned a woman named Olive Louise Thornbergh a prize of a hundred and fifty dollars in gold.
The village itself broke away from Fridley township on March fourteenth, eighteen ninety-eight, with about a hundred citizens and twenty houses scattered across roughly seventeen hundred acres. Polish, Irish, and Scandinavian immigrants were among the first to settle here at the turn of the century, farming the fertile land. The community formally adopted its city charter in nineteen twenty-one. What began as a farm community with a catchy contest name grew into a close-in suburb on the northern edge of the Twin Cities.
