Pine City: Logs, Lakes, and the County Seat

Pine City stands along the Snake River in east-central Minnesota, in a landscape that was once a sea of eastern white pine. The town was platted in eighteen sixty-nine as the Northern Pacific Railroad pushed through the region, and lumber was the draw: massive pine forests covered the surrounding hills, and mills needed to be near the tracks. By eighteen seventy-two the county seat of Pine County had been moved here from Chengwatana, consolidating civic and commercial life in one place.

Pine City incorporated on February fourteenth, eighteen eighty-one, and when the timber ran out, the surrounding lakes made it a resort town instead. Today it is a small county seat of about three thousand, still named for the forests that brought the first settlers but largely replaced by second-growth trees and fishing resorts.