Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Holdingford, MN

Holdingford is a city in Stearns County, Minnesota, and part of the St. Cloud Metropolitan Statistical Area.

Holdingford calls itself "The Gateway to Lake Wobegon," after the fictional central Minnesota town created by Garrison Keillor, and its motto is "Most Scenic Part Of The Lake Wobegon Trail."

Holdingford was platted in the 1870s by Randolph Holding on a site near a ford, and a post office has been in operation there since 1872.

Holdingford was originally called the "Scotch Settlement" because its earliest settlers and the founders of St. Mary's Church were Scottish-Canadian immigrants from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.

The Holdingford area was settled heavily by German, Polish and Slovenian Catholic immigrants drawn to Stearns County by missionary Father Francis X. Pierz's newspaper articles of 1851, and the county still has one of the largest rural Catholic populations in Anglo-America.

Around 1897, Slovak and Rusyn settlers northeast of Holdingford built St. Mary's Russian Orthodox Church, whose altar lamp was a personal gift from Tsar Nicholas II; in 1902 Bishop Tikhon, the future Patriarch of Moscow, traveled there to bless the church.

During Prohibition, Holdingford earned the title of "moonshine capital of Minnesota," as Twin Cities, Chicago and Kansas City crime figures made trips to the area to buy the locally distilled high-quality moonshine known as Minnesota 13.

As of the 2020 census, Holdingford had a population of 743 people in 316 households, up from 708 people in 2010.

Holdingford native Elmer Kerestes, a U.S. Navy fireman killed aboard the USS Oklahoma at Pearl Harbor, was identified through DNA testing in 2017 and returned home for burial with full military honors, with residents lining his 25-mile funeral route.