By Peter Boulay, Heritage Preservation Commissioner
Maplewood has its own "Ghost Town." English Street and Frost Avenue was the center of this now vanished city. In the final years of the nineteenth century it was a very different place.
In 1886, William and Mary Dawson founded Gladstone, named after the British Prime Minister. It was a working man's town with two large manufacturing businesses, the St. Paul Plow Works and the Shops of the St. Paul and Duluth Railroad. Soon there were three saloons and one nondenominational church. It also had a constable: "Two Gun" Allen who plied the dusty roads outside the New Canada Town Hall. The town wasn't shy to form an armed posse as well when the need arose.