Thomson: The County Seat That Disappeared
Near Duluth, Minnesota
Thomson was platted in eighteen seventy along the Saint Louis River and named, by one account, for the Canadian explorer and mapmaker David Thompson. It grew quickly in its early years. Its post office opened the same year and stayed open until nineteen fifty-five.
It did not stay large. The neighboring community of Carlton, which became the county seat, outpaced it, and the town slowly deflated over the following decades. The census counted two hundred seven residents in nineteen hundred, one hundred seventy-nine in nineteen sixty, and only one hundred thirty-two by nineteen ninety. In two thousand thirteen, voters in both towns approved consolidating, and the city of Thomson officially ceased to exist in two thousand fifteen, absorbed into its neighbor. In the vote, ninety-four percent of Carlton voters said yes, along with eighty-two percent of Thomson voters, and the merged city kept the name Carlton. The old townsite lies next to what is now Jay Cooke State Park, where the Saint Louis River still tumbles through the same gorge the town once looked out over. The site sits about seven miles southeast of Cloquet and eighteen miles southwest of Duluth, and the Willard Munger State Trail runs through it.
