Endion

By Adelie Bergstrom abergstrom@duluthnews.com

Endion, platted in 1856, began as a township that grew from land claimed by the Hon. William Wallace Kingsbury, delegate to the Minnesota Territorial House of Representatives and later a member of Congress. Endion was annexed to Duluth in 1870.

Duluth’s East End, as Endion was primarily known at the time, grew out from the city’s central district as the 19th century drew to a close. Between 1890 and 1910, Duluth’s population more than doubled, from about 33,000 to about 78,000, and the East End became a fashionable residential district for many of the city’s businessmen and civic leaders.

Today’s Endion neighborhood officially runs between 14th and 26th avenues east and from the lakefront up the hill to either Fourth or Eighth avenues, depending on where you are.

East Superior and East Fourth streets are two main thoroughfares, as well as 21st Avenue East, which connects Interstate 35 with the city’s two universities and several nearby neighborhoods on top of the hill.

London Road is Endion’s other major artery, with a mix of businesses and a few remaining residences.

Pictured in about 1910, the Richard M. Sellwood home at 2215 E. Second St. exemplifies the Endion neighborhood’s grand homes. Between 1890 and 1910, many of Duluth’s business leaders moved into what was then called the East End. Photo courtesy UMD/Northeast Minnesota Historical Collections

The name comes from the New London town settlement that preceded today’s Lakeside. In the 1870s and 1880s, the “New London road” connected the town with Duluth to the south, and the name stuck, first as London Avenue and then London Road by the mid-1890s.

The neighborhood “reflects the prosperity the Zenith City enjoyed in the decades bracketing the turn of the 20th century, when it emerged from a collection of ramshackle pioneer villages to become, by 1910, an urban metropolis 28 miles long and 3 miles wide,” according to a publication from the Duluth Preservation Alliance.

“It was during this time that the population boomed, with the wealthy settling in the East End in part because the terrain was rocky and too costly for the working class to develop — which explains the neighborhood’s concentration of mansions and other luxury homes.”

Today, those homes, many set back on large lots, line the neighborhood’s shady, well-kept streets, dreamed up by well-known Duluth architects of the time such as Oliver Traphagen, W.T. Bray and I. Vernon Hill. Endion is an enduring legacy of one of Duluth’s most prosperous eras as a center of industry and commerce in the great Northwest.