Biohazard Cleanup Near Downtown Baxter Baxter, MN

Baxter is a city in Crow Wing County, Minnesota, immediately west of Brainerd, with the Mississippi River marking its southern border.

Baxter had 8,612 residents at the 2020 census, living in 3,459 households, spread across a spacious 21.11 square miles dotted with lakes and ponds.

Baxter was incorporated on May 25, 1939, and named for Luther Baxter, an attorney for the Northern Pacific Railroad who served in the Minnesota Legislature and as a colonel in the Civil War.

Baxter owes its existence in part to the huge Northern Pacific tie-treating plant that operated here in the 1920s, treating railroad ties for the line that built neighboring Brainerd.

That legacy turned toxic: the Burlington Northern (Brainerd/Baxter) tie-treatment plant, which ran from 1907 to 1985 on the Brainerd-Baxter boundary, became an EPA Superfund site after its unlined wastewater ponds contaminated soil and groundwater with creosote.

Baxter has grown from just 169 people in 1930 to more than 8,600 in 2020, one of the steady success stories of the Brainerd Lakes Area.

Tourism and service industries are now Baxter's biggest employers, with commercial development strung along Minnesota Highways 210 and 371 and housing subdivisions carved into the woods west of Highway 371.

Baxter sits in a terminal moraine left by the Superior Lobe of the Labradorian ice sheet, just north of Minnesota's geographic center.

Baxter's students attend Brainerd Public Schools, and its zoned high school is Brainerd High School.